Negroes and the Gun (27 page)

Fig. 4.5. Shoot-out at Fort Concho. (Frederic Remington's
How the Worm Turned
, oil on canvas, April 1901. St. Lawrence University, Canton, NY.)

Cherokee Bill did everything one expects from a western outlaw—thieving, eluding posses, gun fighting, and murder. Bill's most notorious act of violence was shooting his brother-in-law in an argument over some pigs. Bill also killed a barber, a train-station agent, and a train conductor. After a robbery where he killed a bystander, Bill was arrested and convicted of murder. His saga continued with appeals of his conviction to the United States Supreme Court and an escape attempt with smuggled guns. He finally was hanged in the summer of 1895.
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The black outlaws in Indian Territory highlight the blunt errors of formal racial categories. Cherokee Bill's lineage included many strands of the American melting pot. So too, the Rufus Buck Gang, which plundered the territory for a short, violent spurt. They are reported alternately as Indian, black, and mulatto. An arresting officer described the leader, Rufus Buck, as part black. Photographs suggest that the gang members were a blend of Negro, Native, and white. After a short, violent career of robbery and murder, the gang was run to ground by black Creek Indian police. They surrendered after seven-hour gunfight and died under Judge Parker's hanging justice in July 1896.

Other interracial gangs operated along a similar trajectory. Men like Tom Root, Buss Luckey, and Will Smith rode with a gang of train robbers who fought gun battles against pursuing posses and ultimately were executed under sentence from hanging Judge Parker.
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Some gun criminals in Indian Territory disappoint the stereotype. Della Humby was a simple bully who killed his wife and ambushed an Indian policeman who tried to arrest him. Other lawmen fell to gunfire from men like “Captain”
Wiley, a Negro living among the Seminoles. Wiley killed a federal marshal in what he called a fair fight. He was arrested and died in custody at Fort Smith. This was not the only episode where white lawmen fell to Negro gunfire. In 1892, on a train between Santa Fe and Gainesville, Texas, a black man and a white marshal shot it out after harsh words that started when the marshal sat in the Negro smoking car. It is disputed who drew first. But the marshal and one Negro died from gunfire, and two other black men were arrested.
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Fig. 4.6. Rufus-Buck gang. (Photograph from 1895.)

Black lawmen in Indian Territory demonstrate the diversity of the place. The deputy marshals who extended Judge Charlie Parker's authority into the territory included at least twenty blacks whom we can verify by name and probably others who remain unknown because race was recorded only by happenstance.

Bass Reeves is among the most storied of Parker's black marshals. He is draped in tales of bravery, marksmanship, strength, and stamina that sometimes seem too fantastic to credit. But official reports level out the legend. Reeves is recorded killing fourteen men in the line of duty. He prevailed in numerous nonfatal showdowns and gunfights and rendered hundreds of whites, Indians, and Negroes to Charlie Parker's justice.

The instinct that Parker's black marshals were somehow unique is refuted by men like Willie Kennard, a former Buffalo Soldier, who rode into the town of Yankee Hill,
Colorado, and applied for the marshal's job. A skeptical mayor tested his resolve by sending him to arrest one of the town's notorious villains, a rapist who was drinking in a saloon down the street. In classic western progression, Kennard entered the saloon and the bad man drew his gun. But Kennard was faster. With gun smoke hanging in the air, he dragged the wounded rapist to jail and picked up the marshal's star. He served the town of Yankee Hill for three years before moving on.

Fig. 4.7. Bass Reeves, United States Marshal.

Brit Johnson was not a lawman, but his bravery and exploits fill the expectations about the western hero and form the basis for a tale by a western novelist titled
The
Black Fox
. Brit Johnson was probably born a slave, but by 1871, he was living near Fort Griffin, Texas, with his family. He was already renowned for his 1864 rescue of a group of women and children who were abducted from a settlement in Young County, Texas, by Comanche raiders.

In January 1871, Johnson and three other black cowboys were hauling supplies to Johnson's home when a Comanche band attacked. The details of Johnson's last stand were reconstructed at the scene. All of Johnson's trail mates were quickly killed. Johnson finally succumbed after inflicting multiple casualties. The Comanche corpses and nearly two hundred empty shell cases littered around the spot where Johnson lay dead were evidence of his fight to the death and his skill with the gun.
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As we already have seen, the Buffalo Soldiers are a familiar landing in the story of the black west. These troops are steeped in irony, famously named by the plains Indians whose plight they might easily have sympathized with and whose final defeat they aided. Compounding this irony was the overhang of race in the interactions between the Buffalo Soldiers and many of the constituency they were assigned to protect. Their job as frontier security force was often complicated by the divide of race. The community feeling was evident in east Texas when two Buffalo Soldiers attempted to arrest a white man for murder. The murderer was a better shot and from a privileged class. He killed both soldiers and was acquitted by a jury of his peers.

For Confederates moving west after the Civil War, black men in uniform were hard to abide. In Lincoln County, New Mexico, in two separate episodes, Confederate veterans shot black soldiers for entering diners and bars where whites were eating and drinking. One of these inveterate rebels, Frank Freeman, recently of Alabama, was captured by a squad of black soldiers and then escaped to tell that the soldiers planned to lynch him.
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The fact that they were well-armed and trained to fighting discipline allowed the Buffalo Soldiers to strike back hard either in self-defense or in vengeance. In Kansas in 1867, a mob killing of three black soldiers triggered a gunfight in the streets as their squad mates rode into town seeking retribution. In El Paso, Texas, local police arrested two Buffalo Soldiers, prompting their platoon mates to storm in with government-issue carbines to break them out. Each side lost a man in the gunfire. In Wyoming, Buffalo Soldiers stationed at Camp Bettens endured taunts, threats, and then an attack by townsfolk on two of their platoon mates. They marched into town and retaliated with gunfire. The shootout ended with one casualty, a Buffalo Soldier lying dead in the street. The other soldiers received minor punishments by a military tribunal.
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Even with the hardships they endured, the Buffalo Soldiers fared better than many Negroes of the era. The relative appeal of their lifestyle was evident in the decision former slave girl Cathy Williams to impersonate a man, hone her gun skills, and ride with US Colored Troops serving in New Mexico. She concealed her gender and
did the work of a soldier until injuries sent her to the post surgeon, who reported that she was a woman and had her discharged.

Fig. 4.8. Buffalo Soldier. (
Dismounted Negro, Tenth Cavalry
, Frederic Remington, 1886. From
The Century Magazine
1889, vol. 15. General Photograph Collection, MS 362: 068-1095, University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collections.)

When Ida B. Wells and folk from the east were dreaming of a western promised land at the end of the nineteenth century, being black in America was a challenge no matter where you were. Modern commentators describe this period as the nadir of the black experience in America. Although they might not have used exactly that word, the 1899 assessment of the Douglass Memorial Literary Society of Buffalo Soldiers was basically the same: “Resolved, that there is no future for the Negro in the United States.”
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That sort of grim assessment, coupled with the focus here on deadly encounters and gunplay, demands a point of caution about the unfolding tradition of arms and the daily lives of Negroes. Even during the bleakest times, other things were going on. Black folk still laughed and loved and relished the comforts of family. So, in tracking the black tradition of arms, we must remember that it grew up from countless individual souls who, even under the common burden of racism, still had richly different experiences. They operated under a multitude of different impulses. They
had different capabilities, dispositions, and internal lives. And these things magnified the variations rendered by differences like wealth, occupation, domestic situation, and complexion.

Ida Wells developed an early appreciation for these sorts of differences as she moved gingerly into the circles of Memphis's black elite. As she matured, the interaction of Wells's inner life and her experience in the world produced what some said was a stern and sometimes difficult personality. And it is tempting to conclude that this was predictable. How indeed could someone whose best friend was lynched, someone who advised every Negro household to acquire the assault rifle of the day, have anything but a gloomy countenance?