Lethal Passage (7 page)

Somehow, we came to believe that guns really did win the West. But how was this notion instilled? Where did we lose the thread of history and pick up instead the silken ribbon of myth?

At times, surely, the early frontier lived up to its wild-and-woolly reputation, as when the Indian wars were in full swing, and when competition over the use of land led to bloody range battles such as the April 1892 Johnson County War in northern Wyoming.
For the average resident of the frontier, however, life was more often marked by hard work, loneliness, and stupefying boredom.
People rarely locked their doors, or for that matter, even bothered to install locks.
Burglary was rare, rape close to nonexistent (although rape has always been, and undoubtedly was then, an underreported crime).
Frank Prassel, an Old West historian, examined records of the U.S. District Court in New Mexico Territory dating to the court’s opening in 1890 and found that of its first twenty-six cases, twenty-two involved charges of “fornication” and adultery. Prassel observed, “The West’s lawless element obviously had something on its mind other than bank robbery and cattle theft.”

One of the great entertainments was the rare hanging, which attracted spectators from far off. Hangings were festive events at which the condemned man was expected to offer a remark or two.
Moments before Jeremiah Bailey was executed in Abilene, Kansas, on January 5, 1872, he told the crowd below, “I am on the scaffold about to be launched into the other world. What has brought me to this? Let me tell you, and let these words ring forever in your ears. It was whiskey and the carrying of firearms. Whiskey and the bearing of pistols have ruined me.”

The proliferation of guns and alcohol throughout the West, with the added incendiary influence of gambling, made for dangerous conditions late on a frontier night, especially in mining towns whose occupants were primarily adventurous young men.
According to historian Roger D. McGrath, who studied life in the mining towns of
Bodie, California, and Aurora, Nevada, a chance remark, an old grudge, or an ill-advised challenge to another man’s ego could readily ignite an impromptu gun battle. If one of the parties died, his killer would typically be acquitted for having fired in self-defense. Ordinary citizens tolerated such “fair fights” among consenting hard characters. Anyone who stayed out late with armed, drunken men invited trouble.

Nonetheless, the homicide rate in many frontier towns was surprisingly low. Robert Dykstra, a specialist on Kansas cattle towns, found evidence of only forty-five homicides from 1870 to 1885 in the fabled towns of Abilene, Caldwell, Dodge City, Ellsworth, and Wichita. That works out to 0.6 killings per town per year, not quite the frequency Hollywood has led us to expect.

Citizens of the real West seemed far more appalled by the levels of violence back east.
On March 19, 1872, the
Missouri Republican
called New York City a “Murderers’ Paradise” and reported that “New York … has settled down into the usual condition of chronic indifference, and the murdering business is carried on with an impunity which would be really amusing, were the matter less serious. Hardly a day passes that some one does not receive an eternal quietus at the hands of an assassin.”

Meanwhile, the novelists, pulp writers, and news reporters who comprised the nation’s media were busy confronting a creative challenge: how to rationalize the sheer excitement of the westward expansion, with its attendant gold and land fevers, and the mundane, harsh reality of ordinary frontier life. The answer came readily. Sheriffs became avenging angels, bar fights turned into ritualized duels in the hot noon sun. Dime novelists began transforming frontier characters into heroes even as the real flesh-and-blood figures went about the business of killing, robbing, or peacekeeping.
Buffalo Bill Cody was the hero in 557 dime novels. Frank Tousey gave us the James Boys series about Jesse and Frank James even as the pair continued committing crimes. Edward Z. C. Judson, writing as Ned Buntline, turned Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok into the steely-eyed
lawmen of contemporary myth.
The first book about Billy the Kid appeared July 15, 1881, the day after Sheriff Pat Garret killed him. The book described Billy as wearing a dragoon jacket “of finest broadcloth” and a hat “covered with gold jewels.” Owen Wister’s
The Virginian
, published in 1902, became a best-seller and the prototype of the modern western. Wister gave us one of the most-quoted passages of literature when his hero, having been called a son of a bitch, replied, “When you call me that,
smile
!”

The press spared no exaggeration to populate the West with living legends. Between Dodge City and Tombstone, Deadwood and Sacramento, was a vast, bleak terrain whose immensity we can only begin to appreciate today when flying over such still-desolate territories as Nevada and Utah. The robberies, murders, and Indian battles that did occur were big news partly because that immense expanse of desperately lonely acreage generated so little other news.

The press rose to the challenge.

After Jesse James and two accomplices robbed a Kansas fair on September 26, 1872,
the
Kansas City Star
applauded the deed: “It was as though three bandits had come to us from storied Odenwald, with the halo of medieval chivalry upon their garments, and shown us how things were done that poets sing of. Nowhere else in the civilized world, probably, could this thing have been done.”

Never mind that these chivalrous heroes shot a young girl in the leg.

After Jesse was murdered in 1882, the
Kansas City Journal
wailed, “Goodbye, Jesse!”

The
National Police Gazette
made a goddess of Myra Belle Shirley, known best as Belle Starr and commonly imagined as a beauty. (She was played by Gene Tierney in the 1941 movie
Belle Starr
.) The
Gazette
described her as “the Bandit Queen,” and reported: “She was more amorous than Antony’s mistress, more relentless than Pharaoh’s daughter, and braver than Joan of Arc.”

The true West of course was nothing like what readers in the East were instructed to imagine. Belle Starr, for example, was no Gene
Tierney.
Belle was a profoundly homely woman with a deeply pocked face who stole cattle and horses, robbed stagecoaches, and had a penchant for sleeping with killers and one of her two illegitimate sons. This boy, Ed Reed, later shot her in the back and, after she had fallen, shot her again for good measure, killing her.

Strip away the legends enshrouding the famous outlaws and what you find are pathological killers.
Billy the Kid, far from being the glamorous James Dean–like character of popular imagination, was once described as an “adenoidal moron.”
In a rare act of clear-eyed journalism, the
Silver City New Southwest and Grant Herald
observed: “Despite the glamour of romance thrown about his dare-devil life by sensational writers, the fact is,
he was a low-down vulgar cut-throat, with probably not one redeeming quality.”

Clay Allison, one of the most feared outlaws, was by all appearances a psychopath. He was discharged from the Tennessee Light Artillery after being judged “incapable of performing the duties of a soldier because of a blow received many years ago.” This head injury apparently caused wild swings in his moods, “from mania to intense despondency.” He was alleged to have killed fifteen men in his career as a “shootist,” and to have cut the head off one of them and brought it with him to a bar.
Fabled gunfighter John Wesley Hardin killed forty-four men, perhaps as many as seventy-seven, yet the power of outlaw myth was such that in 1968 Bob Dylan still felt able to describe him in the title song of his album
John Wesley Hardin
as a Robin Hood–like character who “was always known to lend a helping hand.”

The national myth-
werkes
reserved its greatest distortions for the lawmen of the West.
Contrary to popular belief, in many frontier counties and towns, sheriffs and marshals often went unarmed. Rather than shooting it out all day with itinerant gunmen, they confronted the mundane duties familiar to any city policeman today.
In Leadville, Colorado, in 1880, the twenty-two-man police force made 4,320 arrests, most for intoxication and disturbance of the peace.
The real marshal of Dodge City was responsible for street repair and
killing stray dogs, but we never heard a word about this on “Gunsmoke.”
In that mythic realm, Matt Dillon courted Miss Kitty; the real marshal of Dodge had to contend with Big Nose Kate, Noseless Lou, and Squirrel Tooth Alice. Wyatt Earp and his friend Bat Master-son were adept con men and gamblers who also happened to be lawmen.
They were known around Dodge as “the Fighting Pimps.” Earp abandoned his common-law wife, Mattie, who later committed suicide. In a letter to her surviving family, the attending coroner called Earp “a gambler, blackleg, and coward.”

In the mythic West even homicide became a clean, honorable affair that adhered to the Code of the West. In fact, frontier homicide was just as mean and gritty as urban murder is today. Ambush was often the tactic of choice, preferably when the target was stone-cold drunk.
Morgan Earp, one of Wyatt’s brothers, was assassinated by a rifle fired at him through a window.
A thief named Robert Ford murdered Jesse James by shooting him in the back of the head.
The police officer who crept up behind John Wesley Hardin in an El Paso bar and shot him dead no doubt believed he was merely being prudent, given Hardin’s reputation.
In one notorious attack, members of the John Daly gang in Aurora, Nevada, set out to kill William Johnson, the operator of a way station whose employee had killed a horse-thief friend of Daly’s. After running an errand in town, Johnson went to a bar where a member of Daly’s gang pretended all was forgiven and bought him a few drinks. When the bar closed, they moved to another saloon, where Daly and other members of the gang were waiting. The good fellowship continued until about four-thirty
A.M
., when Johnson left. Daly and three other gang members, including a man named William Buckley, ambushed him. Buckley knocked Johnson down. Daly shot him through the head. Then Buckley slashed his throat.

The strategy for such attacks may have been dictated partly by the fact—a fact one does not see mentioned very much in contemporary firearms ads that evoke the frontier—that the cowboy’s trusty six-shooter wasn’t all that trusty. Accidents and malfunctions were
common. “
Lawmen and outlaws alike knew the dangers and limitations of the revolvers they sometimes carried but rarely displayed,” wrote Frank Prassel. “Shooting would be avoided whenever possible, and when demanded it would often be done from cover or concealment.”

The Colt Peacemaker, introduced in 1873, is often called “the gun that won the West,” but it was so prone to accidental discharge that many U.S. Army officers carried the gun loaded with only five cartridges, with the empty sixth chamber under the hammer. On cross-country wagon journeys, firearms accidents sometimes proved a more serious problem than disease.
On one journey, a pioneer mistook his mule for an Indian and shot it twice. Of the four men killed in the famous Johnson County War, two died from accidental gunshot wounds.
In Bodie, California, Roger McGrath discovered, one man “accidentally shot himself in the jaw while inspecting a revolver that had misfired.” Even the West’s celebrities had their accidents.
Clay Allison shot himself in the foot and eventually had to walk with a cane.
Wild Bill Hickok accidentally killed one of his deputies.
On January 9, 1876, Wyatt Earp’s revolver fell from his holster as he sat in the back room of the Custom House saloon in Wichita. According to the
Wichita Beacon
of January 12, “the ball passed through his coat, struck the north wall, then glanced off and passed out through the ceiling. It was a narrow escape and the occurrence got up a lively stampede from the room.”

Frontier celebrities also did their best to assist in myth manufacturing. They seemed extraordinarily aware of the great significance later historians would assign to their epoch.
When Pat Garret published his rather exaggerated account of his pursuit of Billy the Kid, “his name became almost synonymous with western law enforcement,” according to Frank Prassel.
Jesse James’s brother Frank, a member of the James Gang, toured the country with another outlaw, Cole Younger; they billed themselves as the “Cole Younger-Frank James Wild West Show.” Frank later opened the family farm to tourists, charging fifty cents a head.
Bill Tilghman, a famous Oklahoma
lawman, also toured the country and in 1914 made a film called
The Passing of the Oklahoma Outlaws
.
A former train robber, Al Jennings, eventually wound up acting in silent-film westerns, a career that lasted from 1908 to 1920.

The frontier figure who most influenced how America now thinks about the Old West, and indeed about guns, was William Frederick Cody—Buffalo Bill—a frontier scout turned master of self-promotion who first achieved fame in 1869 when Ned Buntline featured him in one of his dime novels.
Cody’s fame was greatly enhanced in 1876 when, while serving as a scout during the Plains Indians wars, he encountered a lone Cheyenne brave. Cody’s horse stumbled, causing Cody to fall. As the brave charged, Cody coolly shot him dead, then scalped him and waved the scalp over his head. By winter, he was reenacting the incident over and over in a stage drama called “The Red Hand; or, The First Scalp for Custer,” in which he played himself.

In 1882, Cody founded “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West,” a traveling show consisting of dramatic scenes supposedly meant to capture real life on the frontier. Real life, however, wouldn’t have sold many tickets; Cody’s version consisted of stagecoach robberies, Indian attacks, buffalo hunts, and stunning feats of marksmanship. Cody was the star of the show.
As if to dispel any doubt, one showbill noted: “The central figure in these pictures is that of THE HON. W. F. CODY (Buffalo Bill), to whose sagacity, skill, energy and courage … the settlers of the West owe so much for the reclamation of the prairie from the savage Indian and wild animals, who so long opposed the march of civilization.”