Of all the city slickers ever to venture into the 19th century American West, Oscar Wilde towered above the rest, preening like a peacock with his ostentatious wardrobe, his philosophy of art and his knack for spilling printer’s ink across the pages of Western newspapers. In the parlance of the cowboy, Wilde exemplified the “swivel dude,” a gaudy fellow worthy of a second look or a tip of the hat. The flamboyant poet and playwright not only turned heads with his eccentric outfits, but also left Westerners scratching their noggins over his esoteric lectures on “The Decorative Arts” and “The House Beautiful.” For the better part of two months in 1882 Wilde pranced his way across the frontier, a wholly different breed of pioneer.

Arriving in New York City on Jan. 3, 1882, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde spent 51 weeks touring the United States and Canada, traveling 50 of those days west of the Mississippi River. Twenty-seven years old when he arrived, he had accomplished little beyond graduating from Magdalen College, Oxford, self-publishing a play and a thin book of poetry, and ingratiating himself into London’s high society with his quick, sardonic wit. During college and afterward Wilde evolved into both a disciple and a proponent of aestheticism, a philosophy best summarized as “art for art’s sake.” Proponents, or aesthetes as they were called, valued form over function. Aestheticism countered the function-intensive machines of the Industrial Revolution and the Victorian belief that literature and art should provide moral and ethical lessons and restraints on society.

While other aesthetes made greater contributions to the philosophical movement, none was more visible than Wilde, largely due to his extravagant dress and a peculiar fixation on sunflowers and lilies as “the most perfect models of design, the most naturally adapted for decoration—the gaudy leonine beauty of the one and the precious loveliness of the other giving to the artist the most entire and perfect joy.” Wherever he spoke in America, runs on florist shops depleted the supply of those two flowers, as fans and skeptics alike were eager either to laud or mock Wilde with them.

Among the skeptics, dramatist W.S. Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan parodied the aesthetes with a “fleshly poet” named Reginald Bunthorne, the lead character of their 1881 comic opera Patience—the follow-up to their hit comic operas H.M.S. Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance. On the back of the duo’s latest success, their producer, Richard D’Oyly Carte, decided to take Patience across the pond to North America. Doubting that Americans would understand the play’s satire, Carte sought an “advance poster” of aestheticism to promote it. Wilde was the natural choice, as Carte was already serving as the poet’s booking manager.

Likely massaging Wilde’s ego with a suggestion his poetry was also popular in the United States, Carte persuaded the Irishman to assume the mantle of the fictional Englishman Bunthorne for a lecture tour. The clincher was Carte’s offer of half the net profits.

What Wilde excelled at most in his young adulthood was self-adoration and self-promotion, often erasing the line between fame and notoriety. When he arrived in New York, the young nation’s biggest celebrity was dime novel hero Buffalo Bill. By the time the aesthete returned to Britain, Wilde—if not eclipsing the future Wild West showman as a household name—had certainly drawn more news coverage than William F. Cody. At very least Wilde was the first celebrity who became famous merely for being famous, launching the superficial celebrity culture that permeates American popular culture to this day.

“lord of the lah-de-dah”

Wilde stood 3 inches over 6 feet. Protruding from his elongated, colorless face was a prominent nose over coarse lips that sheltered greenish-hued teeth, discolored from too many Turkish cigarettes and too few toothbrushes. His thick eyebrows shaded attentive eyes, and a long mop of tawny brown hair brushed against his shoulders. “He looks better in the dark, perhaps” quipped one St. Louis journalist. A portrait of Wilde printed in the competing Leavenworth Times prompted Kansas’ Emporia Daily News to observe, “If it is anything like correct, there will be no chance for Oscar to get a wife in this neck of the woods.”

What Wilde lacked in looks, he made up for with a voguish wardrobe that ranged from dark formal suits to gaudy shirts and cravats in vibrant purples, greens and yellows. For his first appearance west of the Mississippi he chose a more subdued outfit, his trademark knee britches in black over black silk stockings and patent leather pumps with large silver buckles. Above that he wore a white shirt and white waistcoat topped with a long-tailed black coat and white kid gloves.

His presentations, though, were neither as bright nor as entertaining as his attire. Wilde read his speeches in a monotone voice with a verbal quirk accentuating every fourth syllable. In advance of his February tour date in St. Louis the Globe-Democrat reported, “Curiosity to see Oscar Wilde is greater than to hear him.” Following his lecture there to an audience of 1,500 a subhead in the paper’s coverage pronounced, A Large and Fashionable Audience Bored by His Talk on Art. The reporter, like many other Western newsmen, christened Wilde “the lord of the lah-de-dah.” Others just labeled him an “ass-thete.”

After St. Louis and side trips to Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota, Wilde on March 20 took the transcontinental railroad for talks in Sioux City and Omaha before lecturing the philistines of San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, Sacramento and Stockton. Aboard the westbound train Wilde enjoyed the company of actor John Howson, then traveling to San Francisco to play Bunthorne in the West Coast production of Patience. Whenever Wilde wearied of facing the applause or jeers of spectators who thronged train stations to gawk at the aesthete, he’d send out a costumed Howson to greet the folks instead.

After nine days in California, during which he stayed in San Francisco’s luxurious Palace Hotel, Wilde headed back east, stopping first in Salt Lake City, where a Herald reporter attended his lecture and penned a scathing review:      

“What is the attraction about this strange specimen of humanity? Oscar is not handsome and is strikingly awkward; as an elocutionist he violates every rule of rhetoric and is painfully dreary in his manner of expression.…Only in the matters of exhibiting decidedly vulgar front teeth and displaying an abundance of not even wavy hair is he a success.”

Wilde then moved on to Denver, Leadville, Colorado Springs, Kansas City, St. Joseph, Topeka, Lawrence, Atchison and Lincoln before wrapping up on April 29 with a whirlwind tour of five Iowa communities. In June he returned west for appearances in Fort Worth, Galveston, Houston and San Antonio. By the time he ended his Texas swing, Wilde had cleared $5,605, or nearly $170,000 in present-day dollars. That total did not include the money he personally charged admirers to attend their local functions.

Puzzling the Press

Wherever he went, Wilde made time for newspaper reporters, receiving them in his hotel suite after they had properly provided their calling card to his manservant. Describing his audience with the apostle of aestheticism, a San Antonio Light reporter “found Mr. Wilde taking the world easy in his room at the Menger; he was dressed in drab velvet jacket, blue tie, white waistcoat, light drab trousers, scarlet stockings and slippers. A table covered with books, a lemonade—with a stick in it—and a huge bunch of mammoth cigarettes made up the array that confronted our aesthetic reporter.”

Wilde flattered reporters to their faces and then demeaned them behind their backs, prompting Tucson’s Arizona Daily Star to observe, “The average reporter may not have a very exalted idea of art, but he knows human nature too well to stick himself in knee breeches and call it brains instead of brass.” In the end, Wilde and the press used each other—the aesthete to enhance the fame he craved, the reporters to sell papers.

Audiences either revered Wilde for his intellect, even if they didn’t understand it, or ridiculed him for his eccentricities. “Oscar Wilde, the apostle of the beautiful, is here,” The Topeka Daily Capital gushed, “and there is no doubt that he will have a full house. Topeka is essentially aesthetic, and to hear the great exponent of true culture is an opportunity which may never occur again.” Nebraska’s North Bend Bulletin was considerably less flattering in its report of the lecturer’s forthcoming stop in nearby Fremont: “Oscar Wilde is coming. It’s just awful.”

Besides his dry, droll delivery, Wilde’s standard topics on art and beauty seldom resonated with people scratching a living from the earth. For instance, as decorative flourishes in the home the aesthete recommended tiny porcelain cups over their heavier crockery cousins—this to listeners who set tables with often little more than tinware. Further, he prescribed tiled, not carpeted, floors; porcelain, not cast-iron, stoves; and wainscoting, not papered walls. Such advice might have had greater application east of the Mississippi, but out West, to people living in adobe jacals or log cabins, it lacked pertinence.

Less forgivable was lord lah-de-dah’s condescension toward people unable to broaden his fame and wealth, conduct that grated on Western sensibilities. “Oscar Wilde was more bother than all the women who ever rode in a railroad car,” one Chicago-based train conductor recalled. “He had an idea that he was the greatest man America had ever seen.…He was the vainest, most conceited mule I ever saw. He wouldn’t drink water out of the glass at the cooler, but sipped it out of a silver and gold mug he carried with him.”

High Times in Leadville

Wilde’s impromptu April 13 visit to Leadville, Colo., endured as the most colorful of the aesthete’s stops across America. Though it was not on his original itinerary, Wilde squeezed in an appearance between lectures in Denver and Colorado Springs after no less a figure than Lt. Gov. Horace A.W. Tabor, the “Bonanza King of Leadville,” offered the poet a tour of his Matchless silver mine.

Wilde recalled the silver boomtown as “the richest city in the world…[with] the reputation of being the roughest, and every man carries a revolver. I was told that if I went there, they would be sure to shoot me or my traveling manager. I wrote and told them that nothing they could do to my traveling manager would intimidate me.”

When he reached Leadville (elev. 10,158 feet) after a bumpy 150-mile, six-hour train ride, he felt understandably lightheaded, nauseous and short of breath. A doctor called to his Clarendon Hotel suite identified his malady as “a case of light air,” or altitude sickness as it is known today. The doctor prescribed medicine and rest while Leadville anticipated his appearance.

The aesthete eventually recovered enough to dress in color-coordinated knee britches, stockings, shirt, fancy cravat, dress coat and a broad-brimmed hat. Before striding across the covered bridge that connected the hotel’s third floor with the ritzy Tabor Opera House, Wilde unpacked his copy of The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, reasoning that if he were too weak to deliver his lecture, he could read passages from it to attendees. What could be more appropriate? he thought, for like the hardscrabble miners in the audience, the great Renaissance artist also worked in silver.

As the minute hand slipped well past Wilde’s scheduled appearance, the Leadville Daily Herald recalled, “a whole house of curiosity seekers,” some having paid as much as a $1.25 for reserved seats, fidgeted impatiently. When the lecturer did finally show, the Herald reporter wrote, he “stumbled onto the stage with a stride more becoming a giant backwoodsman than an aesthete.” Placing his speech and the Cellini autobiography on the podium, Wilde launched into a variation on his decorative arts spiel.

As the lecture dragged on, the audience grew noticeably restless, so Wilde turned to the autobiography, drawing a reprimand from a boisterous miner questioning why Wilde hadn’t invited Cellini to speak for himself.

“He’s dead,” Wilde explained.

“Who shot him?” replied the curious miner.

Somehow the lecturer made it through his talk without taking a bullet, though the Herald reporter took a potshot at Wilde in print, writing, “The most notable feature of Mr. Wilde’s lecture was the rather boisterous good humor of the audience.”

After the lecture Wilde returned to the hotel to change into more practical clothing and grab a coat for his tour of town and the Matchless. With Mayor David H. Dougan and select Tabor employees acting as guides, the lecturer stepped into the crisp night air, which seemed to revive him. Wilde saw and heard Leadville’s nightlife, a cacophony of drunken carousers, brass bands, tinkling pianos, spinning roulette wheels, screeching women proffering nocturnal delights and boardwalk barkers for saloons bearing such colorful, albeit sometimes misleading, names as the Red Light, Silver Thread, Tudor, Little Casino, Bon Ton, Board of Trade, Chamber of Commerce and Little Church, the latter of which boasted a mock chapel as its entrance.

The tour was an eye- and earful for Wilde, who followed his guides into Pop Wyman’s rollicking saloon. Rumor had it Wyman had killed several men in his younger years and carried a change purse made from a human scrotum. Wilde complimented the saloon owner for a sign over the piano reading, Please Do Not Shoot the Pianist; He Is Doing His Best, calling it “the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across.” He later elaborated on the message, writing, “I was struck with this recognition of the fact that bad art merits the penalty of death, and I felt in this remote city, where the aesthetic applications of the revolver were clearly established in the case of music,
my apostolic task would be much simplified.”

From Wyman’s the mayor had the party loaded in wagons and driven 2 miles to the Matchless, where mine superintendent Charles Pishon accompanied Wilde down shaft No. 3 in a metal ore bucket lowered 100 feet into the pitch black by a cable-and-pulley system. A dozen miners greeted their guest, showing Wilde silver in its natural state and letting him drill the start of a new shaft they dubbed “The Oscar.” Quipped Wilde, “I had hope that in their grand, simple way they would have offered me shares in ‘The Oscar,’ but in their artless, untutored fashion they did not.”

The mining soiree ended with an early morning supper, Wilde wrote tongue in cheek, “the first course whiskey, the second whiskey and the third whiskey.” By the time those gathered had emptied all the bottles, their foppish guest had impressed his hosts for his ability to hold liquor without any visible signs of inebriation. Finally re-emerging from the mine, Wilde returned to the hotel for a brief rest before boarding a train to Colorado Springs to deliver a speech just 14 hours later. He was no worse for the wear.

Heading for Home

On writing about his experiences out West, Wilde largely mocked the “barbarians” he had striven to enlighten. “Infinitesimal did I find the knowledge of art west of the Rocky Mountains,” he recalled, illustrating his criticism with the story of a miner who had struck wealth beyond his education and turned to culture to flaunt his riches. After ordering a replica of the Venus de Milo from Paris, Wilde wrote, the nouveau riche miner “actually sued the railroad company for damages because the plaster cast…had been delivered minus the arms. And, what is more surprising still, he gained his case and the damages.”

Americans likewise found fault with Wilde as he prepared to leave the States that December. Wrote one acquaintance, “He is guilty of all sorts of petty meanness, such as perpetually begging cigarettes from acquaintances and never offering any himself; eating dinners with indefatigable industry at other people’s expense, sneaking out of paying cab fares; and ‘working’ his friends shamelessly for whatever he can get out of them.”

Yet, for all his snobbery, Wilde still found a noble quality among the Westerners, observing, “The West has kept itself free and independent, while the East has been caught and spoiled with many of the flirting follies of Europe.”

By the time he left New York City for home, Wilde had traveled some 15,000 miles through 30 of the 38 United States, leaving in his wake more than 500 major newspaper features and countless Westerners scratching their heads at what they had seen and/or heard. His fame briefly surpassed that of Buffalo Bill, at least until Cody started his Wild West show the next year. Nine years after returning home Wilde finally attained the literary notoriety he’d craved with publication of his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Unlike other city slickers who visited the American West, Wilde conned more folks than outwitted him, and he left with more money than he had yet earned. Despite the Irish peacock’s biting condescension, his annoying arrogance and his numerous faults—or perhaps because of them—Wilde could claim the title of the Wild West’s all-time slickest dude.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Wild West magazine. For further reading, author Preston Lewis recommends Wilde in America: Oscar Wilde and the Invention of Modern Celebrity, by David M. Friedman; Oscar Wilde Discovers America (1882), by Lloyd Lewis and Henry Justin Smith; and Oscar Wilde, by Richard Ellmann.

To the disbelief of gaping onlookers in the packed stands at El Toreo, Mexico City’s largest bullring, American rodeo performer Bill Pickett clung to the horns of a massive Mexican bull ironically named Frijoles Chiquitos (“Little Beans”). Watching from a safe distance in the saddle atop jittery horses were cowhand Vester Pegg and siblings Joe and Zack Miller, proprietors of the Miller Bros. 101 Ranch Real Wild West. Matadors, including the famed Manuel Mejíjas Luján (aka “Bienvenida”), also stood by as Bill grappled with the snorting, gyrating wild beast, which Mexican and Spanish bullfighters alike typically fought from a more dignified distance. Funny thing is, Pickett wasn’t even supposed to be there. Days earlier he’d been working one of the Miller family ranches back in Oklahoma.

It was early December 1908, and the Real Wild West had come off a grueling tour of the United States. Instead of heading home to lick their wounds, however, Joe and Zack Miller took the show south of the border. Though still two years from the onset of the Mexican Revolution, that southern neighbor was already in turmoil. The troupe endured several intrusive (and costly in bribes) searches by customs officials before arriving in Mexico City on December 11. The streets of the heavily populated capital were clogged with Roman Catholic pilgrims preparing for the next day’s Our Lady of Guadalupe observance, marking the 1531 visions of the Virgin Mary to believers in that Mexican city. The observance also marked the start of the show’s two-week run at the circus arena in Porfirio Díaz Park.

Low attendance and gouging fines for Pickett’s failure to appear, though “The Dusky Demon” was prominently featured in advertisements, led Joe to telegram brother George, back at the 101 Ranch, with instructions to have Pickett travel down by train immediately. Shortly after the bulldogger arrived and began performing, Joe and the show’s press agent, W.C. Thompson, stopped in at the Café Colón, a popular eatery among matadors and local reporters, where Joe hoped to gin up publicity for the show. When a table of matadors directed their laughter at the gringos, Joe asked what they found so humorous. They told him they had attended the show that afternoon and were unimpressed with Pickett’s antics in the ring, comparing him to a novice bullfighter. An indignant Miller challenged them on the spot to go toe to toe with Pickett in a bulldogging event. On behalf of the group, Bienvenida accepted and agreed to show up at the circus arena at 10 the next morning. But neither he nor any other matador took up the challenge, claiming the arena promoters forbade them from taking any such foolish risk.

After several days of verbal exchanges, challenges and braying newspaper ads, Miller bet the arena promoters Pickett could remain alone in the ring for 15 minutes with their fiercest fighting bull and spend at least five minutes of that time grappling barehanded with the beast, wrestling it to the ground if possible. If Pickett succeeded, the Millers would collect the gate receipts for the day. Joe also made a 5,000-peso side bet. The publicity from his wager and newspaper coverage led promoters to move the bulldogging spectacle, scheduled for December 23, to the far larger El Toreo. Within days Mexico City’s largest venue had sold out.

On the afternoon of the 23rd Pickett trotted into the arena atop his favorite horse, Spradley, to a cacophony of cheers, boos and hisses from an estimated 25,000 onlookers. As the blare of the opening trumpets faded, the gate to the corrals swung wide, and Frijoles Chiquitos stormed into the ring. When the bull saw Pickett and raced across the arena toward him, Bill saw right off that his terrified hazers would be of no use.

Steering Spradley in close to Frijoles Chiquitos, Bill sought to maneuver into position to leap on the bull’s bulging neck. Each time the rampaging beast gave them the slip. Suddenly, the bull swung around and charged rider and horse from behind. Spradley could not evade the rush, and one of Frijoles Chiquitos’ horns ripped open the horse’s rump, causing it to stumble. Taking advantage of the distraction, Pickett dove from the saddle. Locking on to the bull’s horns, he wrapped himself around its writhing neck and rode Frijoles Chiquitos as the crowd rose to its feet in anticipation. The bull tried everything it could to free itself of Pickett, to no avail. For several  agonizing minutes it wildly shook its great head, slashing with its horns, as the determined bulldogger clung tight, looking for an opportunity to take the animal to the ground.

Likely bemoaning their decision to bet against the do-or-die Yankee, the crowd turned on Bill and began pelting him with whatever was at hand. Fruit, cushions, rocks, bottles, even bricks rained down from the stands. After taking a rock to the side of his face and a beer bottle to the ribs, a bleeding and dazed Pickett released his iron grip on the raging Frijoles Chiquitos and lay on the arena floor grimacing in pain. Rushing in, his 101 Ranch hazers finally distracted the bull long enough to help Bill to his feet and out of the ring.

The crowd’s delight at Pickett’s failure turned to disappointment on learning he’d made it to the 5-minute mark, thus winning the wager. With his seven and a half minute ride the bulldogger had earned the show a whopping 48,000 pesos (north of $450,000 in today’s dollars), not to mention Joe’s side bet. The day after Christmas the show wrapped up its lucrative run in Mexico City and headed back north. Joe canceled a scheduled show in Gainesville, Texas, and as the train arrived in Bliss, Okla., weary troupe members clapped and cheered at being home. The big payday had helped buffer an otherwise tough financial year, and the show’s future seemed bright.

A Working Ranch

Most Western historians cite 1881 as the year 101 Ranch patriarch Colonel George Washington Miller first seared his brand on cattle. A notorious namesake San Antonio saloon is said to have inspired the brand. Whatever the truth, that first bitter wisp of burnt hide launched a story for the ages, as the 101 was destined to become one of the most recognizable names in both ranching and Western entertainment.

A Kentucky native, Miller fought for the Confederacy in his 20s and moved west after the Civil War, initially settling in southwest Missouri and driving cattle from Texas to the railheads in Kansas. Miller later moved his herds to land leased from the Quapaw tribe in Indian Territory (present-day northeast Oklahoma) while residing just across the border in Baxter Springs, Kan. He cultivated a relationship with the Ponca tribe when it was briefly displaced to the Quapaw Agency. Miller suggested the Poncas settle on land farther west in the Cherokee Outlet. After the federal government forced ranchers out of the outlet in 1893, the Poncas did just that, and Miller leased their land for his operations, setting up headquarters near the tribal hub at New Ponca (renamed Ponca City in 1913). The 101 Ranch ultimately comprised 110,000 acres.

After Miller succumbed to pneumonia in 1903, wife Molly had the ranch turned into a trust, with Joe, Zack and George as equal partners and shareholders. From then on the trio ran the whole shooting match. At the time of their father’s death Joseph Carson Miller was 35 years old, Zachary Taylor Miller 25, and the youngest, George Lee Miller, 21. Each brother developed unique interests and skills, enabling them to divide oversight of the 101 effectively and without rancor. Together they remained focused on realizing their father’s dream to build the nation’s largest and most influential ranch.

The rich soil already grew a range of crops, while livestock included cattle, bison, hogs, poultry and several breeds of horse. The brothers continued to experiment with crops and added an electric plant, a cannery, a dairy, a tannery, a store, a restaurant and several mills. Promoted as the “greatest diversified farm on earth,” the ranch prospered well into the early 20th century.

Of course, oil too played a role. Ernest W. Marland, of Marland Oil Co., spearheaded the search for crude deposits on the family spread and helped form the 101 Ranch Oil Co. That highly successful venture substantially increased the Millers’ profit margin.

All-important downtime served to seed the brothers’ entrance into show business.

What became the Real Wild West had its roots in late summer or early fall 1882 in Winfield, Kan., where Colonel Miller, Mollie and their children had recently moved. Miller and hands had just finished a cattle drive up the Chisolm Trail from Texas. Meanwhile, Winfield city leaders were planning an agricultural fair and wanted entertainment. Miller proposed his cowboys put on a roping and riding exhibition, and the event planners enthusiastically accepted his offer. Miller’s “roundup,” as he called it, proved a roaring success.

The business of running a sprawling ranch intervened, and it wasn’t until 1904, a year after Colonel Miller’s death, that the 101 hosted its next roundup. This time it was the Miller brothers’ brainchild.

That year Joe Miller visited the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Mo. While there he and leading Oklahoma newspapermen met with the board of directors of the National Editorial Association, hoping to convince the board to hold its 1905 convention in Guthrie. To sweeten the pot, Joe told the directors the 101 Ranch would host them and put on a big Wild West show in their honor. The board bit and approved the proposal.

The Millers thought it best to prepare for the 1905 event by holding a roundup in the fall of 1904. Pleased with the enthusiastic turnout, the brothers planned the 1905 roundup, which they grandly dubbed the Oklahoma Gala. Dozens of trains were needed to help transport the more than 65,000 people who attended the elaborate opening parade on June 11. It was the largest crowd yet assembled for an event in Oklahoma.

The June gala ended with a reenactment of a wagon train attack by 300 Indians. Gunfire and bloodcurdling screams rose from the arena floor as wagons caught fire and settlers closed with their assailants in mortal combat. More credulous onlookers feared they were witnessing a real massacre. Then, out of nowhere, a posse of cowboys rode to the rescue, guns blazing. As the act drew to a close, the performers gathered at the center of the arena to a standing ovation. The Miller brothers joined the troupe to bask in the crowd’s appreciation.

Over the next two decades the Millers hosted annual roundups at the 101, seating up to 10,000 spectators in an arena just across from ranch headquarters. The program always included roping, riding and bulldogging, as well as Indian dances and other Western cultural offerings. The brothers employed top cowboys from across the region, and Pickett and other well-known 101 Ranch hands went on to stardom in Hollywood Westerns.

The “Show Business Bug”

Planning for the June 1905 Oklahoma Gala had another unexpected offshoot, for Joe caught the “show business bug” in a big way. Looking ahead to the June gala, he and Zack arranged to have some of their performers join Colonel Zack Mulhall and his touring Western troupe in a series of shows that April at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. Appearing before packed houses in one the biggest venues of the era gave the brothers an opportunity to learn the production aspects of a touring show. It also afforded their performers rehearsal time for the upcoming gala. Among the Miller hands appearing at the garden was Will Rogers, then a relative unknown. Indeed, Mulhall initially turned down Rogers, who had to enlist the help of the colonel’s wife, Mary, to secure a spot on the program.

It is ironic, then, that while the Madison Square Garden run proved successful for Mulhall, Rogers benefited all the more from his appearance. The turning point came amid the sixth show when a steer got loose and entered the stands. Thinking quickly, Will lassoed the wayward animal and guided it back to the arena floor, saving the day. The publicity generated by his courage, talent with a lariat and wit prompted a shrewd promoter to offer him a starring role, performing his rope acts solo on vaudeville stages in Manhattan.

Meanwhile, Joe, Zack and their well-rehearsed performers returned to Oklahoma to finish preparations for the gala. Taking a page from Mulhall, the Millers generated a marketing blitz, published in newspapers and spread through contacts nationwide, describing what attendees could expect on June 11. The lineup included bulldogger Pickett, trick rider Lucille Mulhall (the colonel’s daughter), expert horseman and crack shot Tom Mix and a supporting cast of almost a thousand performers, many from the local Ponca and Otoe tribes.

The 101 Real Wild West was one step from becoming one of the most popular traveling Western entertainment troupes of its era.

Taking the Show on the Road

Encouraged by their successful 1905 gala, and at the urging of Oklahoma neighbor Gordon W. “Pawnee Bill” Lillie—who’d already made a name for himself as the founder and proprietor of Pawnee Bill’s Wild West—the Millers took their show on the road full time in 1907. Favorable publicity from an early run in Kansas City, Mo., caught the notice of Theodore Roosevelt. The “Cowboy President” was already acquainted with the Millers from prior visits to their ranch. (On his invitation Mix had ridden in the president’s 1905 inaugural parade alongside Roosevelt’s Spanish-American War “Rough Riders,” sparking a rumor the 101 Ranch hand had been a Rough Rider himself.) Roosevelt persuaded the Millers to bring their show to Norfolk, Va., as part of the Jamestown Exposition. At the close of that 100-day run the exposition promoters helped land the Real Wild West a two-week run at the Chicago Coliseum. The publicity from 1907 led to the busy but grueling 1908 tour, starting at Brighton Beach, N.Y. Through 1916 the Millers and their performers were at the top of their game as crowds grew ever bigger, drawn by a spreading fascination with cowboys, Indians and all things Western.

In 1916 the Millers merged their production with Cody’s arena show and toured as Buffalo Bill (Himself) & the 101 Ranch Wild West Combined, though the nation’s growing involvement in World War I put the tour on hold later that year. Cody died soon after, on Jan. 10, 1917. Going back on the road in 1925, the Real Wild West toured throughout the United States and abroad, traveling to Mexico, Canada, Europe and South America.

Through the 1920s, however, the 101 Ranch Real Wild West, Pawnee Bill’s Wild West and other touring shows drew ever smaller crowds, leading to severe financial losses. By then such productions faced stiff competition from the film industry, as well as proliferating circuses and rodeos. Making matters worse for the Real Wild West, Joe Miller died in 1927, followed two years later by the death of brother George. Then came the Great Depression, which drastically cut into profits from the ranch and show. Zack alone could not pull the operation out of its tailspin, and in 1931 the 101 Ranch and its associated businesses went into receivership. A year later much of the land was divided and leased, and authorities auctioned everything of value to cover debts. On Jan. 3, 1952, a nearly destitute Zack Miller died.      

Today one may visit the site of the ranch headquarters, though all that’s left are a few weathered buildings, the foundation of the Miller home (known in its prime as the “White House”) and a few historical markers describing what once was. An excellent nonprofit named the 101 Ranch Old Timers Association continues its work to keep the ranch and show legacy alive. Its members support a wonderful museum housed within oilman E.W. Marland’s Grand Home in Ponca City and host annual events and tours for the public. And so the show goes on.

New Mexico–based E. Joe Brown is an award-winning author of novels, short stories and memoirs. For further reading he recommends The Real Wild West: The 101 Ranch and the Creation of the American West, by Michael Wallis, and The 101 Ranch, by Ellsworth Collings and Alma Miller England.

This article was originally published in the Spring 2024 issue of Wild West.

By the early 1850s gold fever had spread across the American West. Southwestern Oregon Territory was no exception, as placer miners had descended on Coyote Creek in what today is Josephine County. Camps sprang up, and the goldfields remained a beehive of activity until gold strikes in neighboring Idaho in the 1860s drew the miners away. But the Coyote Creek diggings would experience a resurgence, and a town would be born of it.

After a few short years the excitement in Idaho faded. Miners returned to Coyote Creek to find 500 Chinese laborers working the old claims for 10 cents a day plus rice. The miners demanded their claims be returned, and the Chinese contractor yielded. Again, small camps sprang up, including one named Goldville.

By the late 1870s placer mining had given way to more efficient hydraulic mining, bringing a whole new flood of gold seekers. Among them was the Rev. William Ruble, who arrived with his wife, sons Bill and Schuyler and their families. The Rubles were Campbellites, aka Disciples of Christ, committed to restoring an early form of Christianity that adhered to strict doctrine. Disenchanted with the evils of society, they had taken to the Oregon Trail in 1853 and landed first in Salem, where they took up farming and the nursery business.

Over the span of a dozen years the Rev. Ruble bought up the majority of mines and claims in the area. He also set up mining businesses for his sons. William and son Schuyler invented the Ruble hydraulic elevator, designed to separate coarse rock from finer material in a placer mine.

The Rev. Ruble and sons set about improving Goldville and founded it as the town of Golden in 1890, the post office opening in 1896. After building the family residence and a Campbellite church, the Rubles added a school, a general store and other homes. Theirs was a monumental effort at civilizing the area, though some miners, particularly single ones, were less enthusiastic about the mores of its founders. The Campbellites did not permit the busy saloons and brothels of other prosperous camps, nor is there a record of the town ever hosting a dance. Miners seeking such pleasures had to travel to the town of Placer, a few miles south on Graves Creek, which did a booming business in sin.

Golden itself remained relatively small, never home to more than 200 or so people, with another several hundred in the surrounding area. Despite its dearth of entertainment, the town held on for nearly 30 years, only to fade as the ore faded in value. Perhaps sensing its decline and his own, the Rev. Ruble left in 1901, his sons and their families soon following his example. The founder of Golden died in Salem in 1905.

A year later Golden school reported three dozen students in attendance. But the exodus continued, and the post office shuttered in 1920. Mining dribbled along into the mid-20th century, but the town faded into a ghost.

Today the Campbellites’ quaint and attractive 1892 Golden Church still stands. Nearby is the Rubles’ house, also built in 1892. Also surviving is a 1904 general store, an outhouse and the remains of other outbuildings, including the carriage house.

There are no extant businesses in Golden, but the church is always open. Nearby is a small cemetery, though oddly enough no residents of Golden reside in it. In fact, no one has found eternal rest there, for the little graveyard sprouted up as a small-screen stage set. In 1972 the producers of the popular Western series Gunsmoke filmed an episode in Golden, one scene requiring a cemetery, and the rest is TV history. Visitors unaware of its short history still leave coins and trinkets atop the fictitious grave markers. The town and its pretend cemetery have since served as a backdrop for other Western productions.

In the 1990s concerned residents formed the Golden Coyote Wetlands to preserve the town and adjacent creek. Owned today by the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department, Golden is a state heritage site and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Those interested in a longer visit can stay in a nearby campground off Coyote Creek Road, which runs through town.

Despite its lack of what many miners considered “essentials,” Golden survived more than 130 years to earn protected status for coming generations. Most ghost towns of southern Oregon weren’t as fortunate, having fallen into ruin or been stamped out of existence beneath the ever rolling wheels of progress. 

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Wild West magazine.

Center stage in a northern Colorado museum is an unmistakable symbol of the West. Faint lettering on the driver’s box of the historic stagecoach reads U.S. Mail, attesting to its original purpose, while covering nearly every square inch of its woodwork are scrawled signatures, hinting at its raucous second career in Wild West shows. Among the signatures is that of down-home humorist Will Rogers.

While it can prove challenging to chisel facts from Western lore, this coach and its storied past endures, thanks to Frank C. Miller Jr. The sharpshooter turned Wild West showman once described how he acquired the coach:

“In the late ’80s and ’90s it was on the ‘Bill’ show (meaning the Buffalo Bill circus) on his many tours, but as it became so old that it would not stand up under the hard knocks required of ‘Indian holdups,’ it was traded for a more modern model. I fought hundreds of Indian battles from the top of the coach myself on the shows. European royalty rode in the coach, as well as Teddy Roosevelt and President [William Howard] Taft, and I believe you will still find Will Rogers’ name written on the back.…When the new coach was put into use, I bought the old coach from Cody and sent it home and have owned it ever since.”

Built in 1874 by the Abbot-Downing Co. of Concord, N.H., the light coach is more correctly called a mud wagon. A basic, unglamorous conveyance, it was made to transport passengers and mail over rough-hewn trails. Given the lack of a paper trail tying the wagon to either Miller or Cody, it is difficult to verify Frank’s story. He may have glossed over the facts, but a kernel or two of truth remains.

A renowned marksman, trick shooter and roper, Miller claimed to have toured with Cody in Europe, though which tour is unknown. As he was 40 years younger than Buffalo Bill, Frank probably would have been too young to join any but one of Cody’s last European tours, between 1902 and ’06. The mud wagon would have been retired by that time, as period advertising featured the Wild West’s more elegant Concord stage, with its higher profile and oval body. Dubbed the “Deadwood Stagecoach,” the latter is on exhibit at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyo.

Franklin Carl Miller Jr. was the third of four children born to immigrant parents. His Danish father and Swedish mother had independently followed the promise of gold to the north-central Colorado mining settlement of Black Hawk, where they married in 1876, later moving to the growing frontier town of Fort Collins, where Frank was born on May 11, 1886. The Millers prospered, running a saloon, a mercantile store and, later, a garage.

Taking a page from Cody, showman Frank became a skilled self-promoter. Local newspapers are peppered with notices of his performances, dinner guests and encounters with notable figures, including a visit to Cody’s foster son, Johnny Baker. Miller worked for Zack Mulhall’s Wild West show and headlined with the Irwin Brothers’ Cheyenne Frontier Days Wild West, which billed him as the “Most Marvelous Marksman in the United States.” When that show closed in 1917, Frank bought a ranch northwest of Fort Collins and married Florence “Peggy” Leedle, a gal who loved the spotlight as much as he did. She performed on horseback, crooning songs, and they adopted a son, Franklin, who went by “Teddy.” Naming their spread Trail’s End, the Millers developed it into a dude ranch, offering fishing, Western entertainment and a menagerie of trained wild animals, including bears and wolves. Newspapers announced regular visits from such celebrities as humorist Rogers, circus performer and actor Fred Stone, sharpshooter Captain A.H. Hardy and novelist Rex Beach.

Miller held performances both on the ranch and in neighboring towns. Central to his show was the mud wagon, which he rode in parades and holdup re-enactments. When the wagon deteriorated, he had it loaded onto a flatbed trailer and performed from atop that.

Just when his show seemed to peak, Miller’s life went into a tailspin. First, wife Peggy left him. Next, at the tail end of the Great Depression, he lost Trail’s End to bankruptcy. Finally, the unthinkable happened. In 1946 son Teddy, who’d joined the Army, was killed in a motor pool fire while stationed in occupied Berlin. He was 19.

It was at that low point the mud wagon, among Teddy’s favorite family keepsakes, took on new meaning. As a memorial to his son and the six other soldiers killed in the fire, a grief-stricken Miller presented the coach to the city. It was initially housed in a small purpose-built brick building with a viewing window.

Today, most of the 150-plus visible signatures on the coach are difficult to read or trace, and many bearing earlier dates are questionable. While there is no way to verify the validity of Rogers’ signature on the upper left rear panel, neither can it be discounted. Miller and the humorist certainly knew each other. Most other signatures appear to be those of tourists or perhaps Trail’s End visitors or show hands. Most date from between the 1910s and ’40s and represent citizens of states across the West and Midwest.

Miller lived out his life in Fort Collins’ Linden Hotel, across the street from the red sandstone building that once housed the family saloon and store. In exchange for his room and board he painted Western scenes and visited schools, regaling young listeners with stories of the Old West and his encounters with Cody and Rogers. On Nov. 21, 1953, Miller, 67, died of a heart attack.

In the mid-1990s Miller’s memorial mud wagon underwent conservation. It has since been housed at the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery, where it symbolizes the many facets of the Old West. With its ties to mail and passenger service, Wild West performances, and perhaps even showman Cody and humorist Rogers, the mud wagon has gained the celebrity Miller had long envisioned. 

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Wild West magazine.

A historian with a brush and a palette, David Wright considers it his mission to depict America’s frontier era with precision. “We historical artists march to a different drummer,” explains Wright [davidwrightart.com] from his home studio in Gallatin, Tenn. “We tell a story. It’s our obligation to future generations to paint our subjects with as much accuracy as possible.”

Wright’s insistence on authenticity has found him riding Wyoming’s Wind River Range on horseback and hunting moose on Canada’s Aulneau Peninsula dressed in brain-tanned buckskins and bearing a frontiersman’s guns and accoutrements. “Such experiences enable me to see things from a much closer perspective than if I were just using past masters like Alfred Jacob Miller, George Catlin and Karl Bodmer as references,” he explains. “Landscapes, rifles, bead and quillwork or Indian tattoos—I want it all to be historically dead-on.” His quest draws him to museums and archives, while his home reference library is also extensive.

“The cliché ‘The more I learn, the less I know’ really is true,” he says. “As long as I am a student of history, I’ll never quit learning.”

Rosine, Ken.—the birthplace of Bill Monroe, the “Father of Bluegrass”—was a country hamlet when Wright was born there in 1942. Idyllic remembrances of flint ridges, cornfields and tobacco rows flood his memories. “My first interests were hunting and fishing and have been all my life.” Always he drew, aided by his mother’s creativity.

“Mom would lay a sheet of paper on her lap and draw,” Wright recalls, then she would take his hand and trace the sketches. At age 9 he won a local art show. After high school he took classes at a Nashville advertising school, then studied watercolor in Italy. The latter move, ironically, kindled his interest in the frontier when he spied a 1777 French musket for sale, bought it and fired it, the flintlock’s smoke and flash awakening latent nostalgia.

By 1962 Wright was back Stateside, drawing for the Nashville Banner and Nashville Tennessean until drafted into service in Vietnam. In 1964 and ’65 he flew more than 100 missions as the door gunner on Bell UH-1 Iroquois (aka “Huey”) helicopters. While in-country he sketched everyone from schoolchildren to Montagnard highlanders and soldiers—though never combat scenes. “Life changes your outlook on things,” the artist says.

On returning home, Wright resumed commercial artwork while freelancing on the side. He experienced another awakening when he joined the rugged fraternity of the American Mountain Men, further sparking his interest in the fur trade as he dressed the part and learned frontier skills.

“Utilizing the day’s firearms and tools gives me an edge in seeing what the lives of our frontier forebears were like,” he explains. “I know what it’s like to build a cabin, split rails, hunt with a flintlock and be freezing in buckskins. I know how wool feels in a snowstorm and how wet leather clings to you.”

Wright’s first mountain man portrait, for Gray Stone Press, sold out. Encouraged, he shifted his focus to portrayals of heroic frontier figures. By 1978 he was following his own muses and garnering national acclaim.

The Eiteljorg Museum, in Indianapolis, has devoted an expansive retrospective to Wright’s work and recognized him with several awards. The Booth Western Art Museum, in Cartersville, Ga., named him an artist of excellence. His art also hangs in Nashville’s Tennessee State Museum and the visitor center of Kentucky’s Cumberland Gap National Historical Park. The Hamilton Collection commissioned Wright to render a series of four collector plates depicting American Indian women. “It is pleasing to be accepted in such a widespread market,” says the artist.

Still, every season finds Wright in the woods, sometimes alone, sometimes with kindred spirits, reliving some footnote of frontier history to preserve in photos, sketches and mental images to inform his paintings. “Every day is a blessing,” says the artist turned mountain man. “Make the most of it.”

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Wild West magazine.

Who was Etta Place?

She was the lover and perhaps wife of Pennsylvania-born Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, aka the “Sundance Kid,” and a peripheral associate of the Wild Bunch, the outlaw gang headed up by Robert LeRoy Parker, aka “Butch Cassidy.” But little is known about her origins and less about what happened to her after Sundance and Butch were killed in South America.

Larry Pointer, author of the 1977 book In Search of Butch Cassidy, wrote that Etta’s identity is “one of the most intriguing riddles in Western history.”

Place was likely born in 1878 and as an adult was described as having “classic good looks,” with a nice smile and a refined bearing, a description confirmed by a full-length portrait of her and Longabaugh—some say the couple’s wedding picture—taken in February 1901 at Joseph B. De Young’s photo studio at 815 Broadway in New York City. She spoke in an educated manner and knew how to handle a rifle.

She had met Longabaugh a year or two earlier and may have been involved in some of the Wild Bunch robberies, scoping out a bank in advance or holding the group’s horses during a heist. But the New York City picture, historian Thom Hatch wrote in his 2013 book The Last Outlaws, “hints of proper high teas, Central Park carriage rides and evenings at the theater.”

Even her name is probably false. “Place” was the maiden name of Longabaugh’s mother, Annie, and Sundance sometimes used the alias “Harry Place.” It has been suggested she took to using the first name “Etta” in South America after Spanish speakers mispronounced “Ethel,” which may or may not have been her actual first name. The Pinkertons variously referred to her as Ethel, Eva, Rita, Etta and Betty Price.

In a letter to friend David Gillespie shortly after the gang’s June 2, 1899, train robbery near Wilcox, Wyo., Longabaugh enclosed a copy of the portrait of himself and Place, whom he described as his wife and a “Texas lady.” The Pinkertons, who spent a lot of time and effort pursuing the Wild Bunch, always believed Etta was from Texas, which fits with her noted skills with horses and firearms. In 1906 William Pinkerton, his detectives having traced Place to Fort Worth, asked that city’s police chief to “find out who this woman is.”

Based on the theory Etta’s real name was Ethel and she hailed from Texas, researcher Donna Ernst compiled a list of all women named Ethel born in or around Fort Worth and San Antonio between 1875 and ’80. Over time she eliminated each as a contender for the youthful Etta Place.

Except one.

That one was Ethel Bishop, who resided with four other women in what was probably a brothel near notorious madam Fannie Porter’s San Antonio pleasure palace, a known Wild Bunch hangout. Another oft repeated story suggests Butch rescued Etta from a brothel when she was 16. Longabaugh biographer Ed Kirby believes Place was the daughter of one Emily Jane Place of Oswego, N.Y., who was related somehow to Sundance’s mother. Still others have suggested Etta was in fact Colorado rancher Ann Bassett, a Wild Bunch associate known to have vied with sister Josie for Cassidy’s affection.

Could Bassett have won Sundance’s attentions as well?

Probably not. By 1903 Bassett had married Hirum “Hi” Henry Bernard and that same year was arrested (and later acquitted) on a charge of cattle rustling while Place was in South America.

On Feb. 20, 1901, after posing for their portrait, Place and Longabaugh boarded HMS Herminius in New York, disembarking in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on March 23. Traveling with them was Cassidy, using the alias “James Ryan” and claiming to be Etta’s brother. In 1902 Place and Longabaugh returned briefly Stateside for Etta to seek treatment of an unknown disease, and again in 1904, when Pinkerton operatives believed she visited family in Texas. In 1906 Place returned Stateside for keeps, possibly due to her illness. Sundance returned to South America, where most historians believe he and Butch died in a 1908 shootout with soldiers in Bolivia.

Meanwhile, Etta vanished.

Several researchers have suggested she became a brothel operator in Fort Worth under the name Eunice Gray. But in an article in the October 2010 Wild West Donna Humphrey-Donnell noted she’d seen an alleged portrait of the young Gray, and the woman in that photo definitely “was not the same woman seen in the famous New York City portrait of Etta Place and the Sundance Kid.”

In 1909 an unidentified woman fitting Etta’s description asked a U.S. diplomatic official in South America for help in obtaining Longabaugh’s death certificate. But she never returned to his office. At most, however, the incident only proves Place was alive in 1909.

Other theories have since surfaced: that Etta was the wife of legendary boxing promoter Tex Rickard; that she relocated to Paraguay and remarried; that Longabaugh had survived the 1908 shootout in Bolivia and lived happily ever after with Place in Alaska; that Etta died in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; or that she was either killed during a domestic dispute or took her own life in Argentina in the 1920s. In 1970 Cassidy’s sister, Lula Parker Betensen, told Los Angeles Times reporters that her brother had not been killed in Bolivia as thought, and that Etta had lived out her days as a schoolteacher in Denver.

In the end, speculation, guesswork and coincidence aside, we only know for certain she was a pretty woman who once carried on a romance with the Sundance Kid and then disappeared from the pages of history.

Nothing more.

To this day similarly incredible tales circulate about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, stories relating their escape from the Bolivian gunfight and their subsequent lives of anonymity in various locales out West or in South America.

Like the theories surrounding Etta Place, though, they are unsubstantiated and probably false.

But tempting. 

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Wild West magazine.

Each year since 1961 Western Writers of America has bestowed on a respected individual its Owen Wister Award for lifetime achievement in the field of Western history. Previous Wister recipients include Oscar-winning director John Ford and actor John Wayne, Pulitzer-winning Kiowa poet and novelist N. Scott Momaday, historian Robert M. Utley and such bestselling novelists as Elmer Kelton and Tony Hillerman. Named for the author of the acclaimed 1902 novel The Virginian, the Wister is WWA’s highest award. The 2024 recipient is Quintard Taylor, a leading scholar in the history of the black experience out West. 

Professor emeritus and the Scott and Dorothy Bullitt professor of American History at the University of Washington, Seattle, Taylor is the author of In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West: 1528–1990 (2024) and editor of the anthology African American Women Confront the West, 1600–2000 (2003). He was born in 1948 in Brownsville, Texas, where his great-grandfather was born into slavery, his father managed a cotton plantation and his mother worked at menial labor. Taylor himself holds master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. In 2007 he founded BlackPast.org, an online encyclopedia of black history boasting 55 million users. 

“Dr. Taylor’s work reflects the evolving and dynamic understanding of the black experience in the American West, a topic that had been long overlooked,” said Max McCoy, WWA’s executive director. “As a pioneer in the effort to bring that experience to a wider audience, he richly deserves this, our highest award.” 

Established in the early 1950s to promote the literature of the American West, the nonprofit WWA has approximately 600 members worldwide, including writers and editors of fiction, nonfiction, songs, poems and screenplays. WWA will honor Taylor and its other award recipients at its annual convention, scheduled for June 19–22, 2024, in Tulsa, Okla.

Picture the colorfully costumed members of the Western quartet Riders in the Sky, and you may catch yourself humming the melody of “Woody’s Roundup,” from the 1999 Disney/Pixar film Toy Story 2. But there’s far more to the Grammy-winning band and its founder, Douglas “Ranger Doug” Green. The Chicago-born musician, arranger, songwriter, singer and yodeler holds a master’s degree in literature from Vanderbilt University and is the author of two music histories, Country Roots: The Origins of Country Music (1976) and Singing in the Saddle: The History of the Singing Cowboy (2002). (His article “Sing, Cowboy, Sing!” a history of the singing cowboy, appeared in the October 2018 Wild West). The tireless 78-year-old performer is also the host of the Sirius XM radio program Ranger Doug’s Classic Cowboy Corral, centered on vintage cowboy music. Often compared to the Sons of the Pioneers, albeit with a whimsical twist, Riders in the Sky [ridersinthesky.com] has been touring for five decades, released more than 40 albums, performed for radio and film, and won two Grammy Awards. Green recently spoke with Wild West from his home in Brentwood, a suburb of Nashville, Tenn.      

Was the singing cowboy of the Old West a real figure or a myth?

Real in the sense that any time men are stranded in isolated situations they will sing and compose. There are lumberjack songs. There are sailor shanties. So, yes, some of the cowboys did sing at the time. Some of them played the fiddle. I don’t know if they played the guitar, but I imagine a few did. It existed. But, yeah, it wasn’t as romantic as played on-screen.

What led you to write Singing in the Saddle?

My interest in singing cowboys. Nobody had ever written a book on the phenomenon. There had been a couple of articles, but nobody had done a detailed study.

Do you have a favorite singing cowboy from the golden era of Western film?

As a kid I liked Tex Ritter, in that he seemed just a little bit more authentic. But, of course, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers have been huge inspirations to me. The Sons of the Pioneers more than anyone. That harmony just tore me up, and I still love it.

Do you have a favorite Western song?

If I had to pick one, I’d say “Woody’s Roundup,” because it’s made me so much money [laughs]!

Points for honesty! What about a classic like “Streets of Laredo”?

That’s an old Irish tune, I understand, and an unforgettable melody. It’s long been one of my favorites to sing.       The song I like, “Green Grow the Lilacs” (Ritter made a hit record of it), is also based on the Irish melody “Green Grows the Laurel.” It’s very sentimental to me because my mom used to sing it. All my kids and all my grandkids have grown up with it as their lullaby song.

What spurred your interest in Western music?

My mother’s family were Finnish immigrants, and their amusement was listening to the National Barn Dance [a precursor of the Grand Ole Opry], out of Chicago. My mother played a little bit of piano, but she sang beautifully. Two of my uncles—Hank and Arvid—played guitar, and I still have Hank’s guitar. First guitar I ever played. I was hoping it would be a pearly Martin, but it turned out to be a ’37 Montgomery Ward.

Whose idea was it to form Riders in the Sky?

Mine. I tried a couple of times with a couple of guys, but they either didn’t have the passion for this kind of music or weren’t the finest singers. But “Too Slim” [Riders in the Sky bassist Fred LaBour] and I had been friends for years and played in folk and bluegrass and junk bands that put a few dollars in our pockets and had fun. He and I started the group on Nov. 11, 1977.

You mix old songs with new ones. Why?

We didn’t want to be a historical throwback. We wanted to add to this tradition. Most of our records have two, three or four original songs.

What’s the future for Riders in the Sky?

Well, obviously this career is going to come to an end sometime. As long as the four of us [Green, LaBour, fiddler “Woody Paul” Chrisman and accordionist Joey “Cow-Polka King” Miskulin] stay healthy—we’re all in our 70s—we just don’t see any reason to stop. Our voices aren’t like when we were young, but we’re coping with that. I’m one of the most blessed guys on earth. 

Adding insult to injury, a Pawnee scout for the U.S. Army shot in 1869 by a member of his own command was for decades denied a marker reflecting his Medal of Honor for the same action. What makes the oversight worse is that Sergeant Mad Bear (Co-Rux-Te-Chod-Ish) was the first American Indian ever awarded his adoptive nation’s highest honor. Thanks to the diligent research of Wild West contributor Jeff Broome, the scout may finally have his day in the sun. 

In the summer of 1869 Major Frank North and his company of Pawnee scouts were in pursuit of Cheyenne Dog Soldiers under Chief Tall Bull along Kansas’ Republican River. On July 8, according to Mad Bear’s citation, the sergeant “ran out from the command in pursuit of a dismounted [Cheyenne]” when badly wounded by the bullet fired by a fellow scout. But when North’s brother Luther wrote a memoir mentioning his own stint as a commander of the scouts, he recorded Mad Bear’s name as Traveling Bear, and the confusion lingered. 

Enter Broome. During research toward his 2003 book Dog Soldier Justice, relating the captivity ordeal of Susanna Alderdice amid the same conflict, he discovered the misattribution of Mad Bear’s medal. The Medal of Honor Historical Society of the United States notified Veterans Affairs of the error, and the latter ultimately concurred. A private marker stands atop Mad Bear’s grave at the North Indian Cemetery in Pawnee, Okla. The Pawnee Nation must first remove it before the VA will place a military marker designating him as a Medal of Honor recipient. So it appears Mad Bear’s luck is about to change.

Books

Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal (1931, by Stuart N. Lake)
Though ex-publicity agent Stuart Lake interviewed ex-lawman Wyatt Earp on several occasions, this ostensible biography is laced with fabrications. One shouldn’t blame Earp. Lake was out to create a folk hero and sell books, and in that he succeeded admirably. Frontier Marshal served as the origin story for several Hollywood films, as well as the popular 1955–61 TV series The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, starring Hugh O’Brian. 

Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend (1997, by Casey Tefertiller)
This is the most balanced extant account of Wyatt’s life and the one book a newcomer to the topic should read before any other. More seasoned readers don’t have to agree with everything Tefertiller writes to appreciate his well-researched narrative.

A Wyatt Earp Anthology: Long May His Story Be Told (2019, edited by Roy B. Young, Gary L. Roberts and Casey Tefertiller) 
This collection of essays provides an overview of Earp’s life and corresponding history from diverse viewpoints. Among those with dueling opinions about the famed lawman are two of the editors who compiled the anthology. Casey Tefertiller considers Earp a heroic figure, while Roy Young thinks him a liar. (Gary Roberts lands somewhere in the middle.) It’s worth bearing in mind that no matter how many people repeat a falsehood attributed to Earp, it doesn’t mean the lie originated with him. 

Wyatt Earp: A Biography of the Legend (2002–10, by Lee A. Silva)
This meticulously researched and documented multivolume work is the authoritative account of Earp’s life. It is a shame author Lee Silva did not live to complete the work.

Murder in Tombstone: The Forgotten Trial of Wyatt Earp (2004, by Steven Lubet)
The trial of the book’s title—examining the actions of Wyatt Earp, brothers Virgil and Morgan Earp, and Doc Holliday at the headline-grabbing gunfight near the O.K. Corral—was actually a pretrial hearing under Justice Wells Spicer to determine whether to present the case to a grand jury. Author and attorney Steven Lubet goes through the hearing in meticulous detail to explain why Spicer ruled as he did, in favor of the defendants.

John Peters Ringo: Mythical Gunfighter (1987, by Ben T. Traywick)
Tombstone town historian and author Ben Traywick was certain of two things about Johnny Ringo: that the gunfighter’s reputation was based on very little, and that Wyatt Earp killed Ringo. While there’s little evidence to prove Wyatt was there when Johnny’s number came up, Traywick’s insistence it wasn’t suicide holds up pretty well under scrutiny.

Movies

Tombstone (1993, on DVD and Blu-ray) 
This George P. Cosmatos film is arguably the greatest Western ever made. It’s not good history, but it perhaps comes closer than any other version. If you think Wyatt Earp (played by Kurt Russell) and Doc Holliday (Val Kilmer) were villains, you’ll hate it. If you recognize them as flawed men who stood up to a politically connected gang of rustlers and assassins, you’ll love it.

Wyatt Earp (1994, on DVD and Blu-ray) 
Director Lawrence Kasdan’s vision of Wyatt Earp (Kevin Costner) and Doc Holliday (Dennis Quaid) also sticks to the facts more closely than previous depictions. Unfortunately for viewers, Wyatt comes across as uptight, and Doc as dark and dislikable, though Quaid did turn in a brilliant performance. While some historians support this take on the relationship between the real-life lawman and gunman, it remains hard to believe they were close friends.

My Darling Clementine (1946, on DVD and Blu-ray)
This John Ford classic features winning performances by Henry Fonda (Earp) and Victor Mature (Holliday), though it bears little semblance to the historic events in Tombstone, particularly the subplot about an imaginary “Clementine” (Cathy Downs) whom the tubercular doctor (not dentist) abandons for her own good. Unfortunately, this is the only account many contemporary viewers learned.

Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957, on DVD and Blu-ray) 
This John Sturges film also rates as great entertainment with little historic value. Burt Lancaster (Earp) and Kirk Douglas (Holliday) turn in powerful performances, bound together less as friends and more as men of honor—a plausible way of viewing the pair. But Ike Clanton never led the Cowboys, and Tombstone didn’t ship cattle, having lacked a rail line at the time. Sung by Frankie Laine, the title ballad will ring in your ears for years to come.

Mention Deadwood and what often pops to mind are sordid scenes straight out of the namesake HBO television series—and to be fair, such scenes aren’t far from the truth. In 1874, on the mere rumor of gold in the Black Hills, prospectors came to the region in droves. Then, in the fall of 1875, such seekers did turn up an especially rich gold deposit in the northern Black Hills. That sparked the stampede to what became known as Deadwood Gulch, as miners staked claims and set up camp in a ravine choked with dead trees.

As happened in many mining camps, Deadwood soon had its share of gambling halls and bordellos. When trail guides “Colorado Charlie” Utter and brother Steve arrived with the first wagonload of prostitutes on July 12, 1876, the sporting women soon had more customers than they could handle. From then on a regular stream of wagons brought prostitutes to town.

Receiving scant regard or care from either their employers or clientele, such women were often subject to abuse. On one headline-grabbing occasion, when a customer started to beat her bloody, a Gem saloon prostitute known as Tricksie (yes, Deadwood fans, there really was a working girl named Tricksie) shot the man through the head. According to Deadwood pioneer and memoirist John S. McClintock, the attending doctor threaded a probe all the way through the shooting victim’s skull. McClintock dubiously claimed to have run into the man on the street some weeks later, though the memoirist didn’t share (or perhaps didn’t know) Trixie’s fate. Such was the miserable welcome prostitutes could expect.

Looking the Other Way

Residents of early Deadwood desperately needed law and order. They got the right man in the spring of 1877 when Dakota Territory Governor John L. Pennington appointed hardware store owner and former Montana lawman Seth Bullock sheriff of Lawrence County. No longer was violent crime tolerated. However, prostitution continued to get a conspicuous pass. After all, it represented a thriving industry in a mining camp where men dominated the population and nine out of 10 women were painted ladies. Thus the brothels of Deadwood became an open secret. The swath of dance halls, gambling dens, saloons and brothels along both sides of lower Main Street, on the north end of town, became known as the “Badlands.” In the typical business arrangement, saloons and variety theaters occupied the first floors, while brothels operated upstairs. By the turn of the century the Badlands occupied an entire block of two-story buildings on the west side of Main.

The district’s prostitutes did not have an easy go of it. Among the worst abusers was Al Swearingen, proprietor of the Gem, who opened his saloon/theater/brothel soon after arriving in the spring of 1876. The women who worked for Swearingen were justly afraid of him, as he was notoriously cruel and domineering. Lured to the Gem on the false promise of respectable employment, unsuspecting women found themselves stranded with no money. Those with no other option were virtually sucked into the life of prostitution.

In the face of violence and degradation, many prostitutes turned to drugs and alcohol, which only deepened their despair. To address their pain and control depression, doctors often prescribed such habit-forming drugs as opium, laudanum and morphine, unintentionally sending the women on a further downward spiral into addiction. In other instances employers drugged their working women to better control them. Suicide attempts became so commonplace among prostitutes in the Badlands that Dr. Frank S. Howe, early Deadwood’s only physician, carried a stomach pump with him on calls to the red-light district.

A Booming Business

By the mid-1880s the boomtown counted more than a hundred brothels. Among the most popular, aside from the Gem, were Fern’s Place, The Cozy Rooms, the 400, the Beige Door, the Three Nickels and the Shasta Rooms. The madams of these notorious establishments included such standouts as May Brown, Eleanora Dumont, Dora DuFran, Belle Haskell, Mollie Johnson and “Poker Alice” Ivers.

DuFran (born Amy Helen Dorothea Bolshaw in England in 1868) was perhaps the best known and certainly the most successful. Dora and her husband, a gambler she met on arrival, operated a string of brothels across the region, from the Dakota boomtowns of Deadwood, Rapid City and Lead to Belle Fourche and Miles City, Mont. Rumor has it DuFran even coined the term “cathouse” for a brothel. Early on she befriended Calamity Jane (Martha Jane Canary), and the pair grew quite close. On occasion Jane worked for Dora, though the former’s refusal to bathe and habit of wearing men’s clothes served to limit her appeal to both customers and the madam herself, who insisted the girls who worked for her practice good hygiene and dress. When a middle-aged Calamity reconnected with DuFran in 1903, Dora hired Jane as a cook and laundress for her Belle Fouche brothel, Diddlin’ Dora’s. By then Calamity was suffering from the effects of alcoholism and a hard life, and Dora cared for Jane up till her death that summer. In 1932 DuFran, writing under the pseudonym d’Dee, published a 12-page biography titled Low Down on Calamity Jane. Of her late friend Dora wrote:

“It’s easy for a woman to be good who has been brought up with every protection from the evils of the world and with good associates. Martha wasn’t that lucky. She was a product of the wild and woolly west. She knew better than anyone where she made her mistakes, and she didn’t rate her virtues as highly as her friends did.”

“Queen of the Blondes”

Another madam with a reputation for charity was Mollie Johnson. Scarcely 23 and already a widow when she arrived in Deadwood, Johnson remarried poorly and was deserted by her second husband before setting up a brothel on Sherman Street in 1878. While there were plenty of prostitutes in town from which to choose, Mollie was partial to hiring those with flaxen hair and became known as the “Queen of the Blondes.” Her establishment soared in popularity, rivaled only by the low-down Swearingen’s Gem.

Like the Gem, Mollie’s joint also provided entertainment. Unlike Swearingen, however, Johnson fancied her bordello as a high-end place and pulled out all the stops. All her girls were talented singers, dancers and balladists. Mollie herself also performed, as a shadow dancer. Wearing very little clothing, she would gyrate behind a screen on which her shadow was projected by a bright light. By all accounts, she brought down the house.

Mollie’s place proved so popular that even respectable society took note. In an 1879 dispatch headlined Sweet Sounds From a Bitter Source, a reporter for the local Black Hills Daily Times warned readers of its temptations:

“At the dead of night, when all nature is hushed in sleep, this reporter is frequently regaled, while on his way home, by the gentle cadence of sweet songs which floats out upon the stillness of the gulch like the silvery horns of elfland faintly blowing. Vocal music, wherever heard or by whatever thing or being produced, is entrancing to this sinner; hence the aforesaid sounds are sure to arrest his step at the corner and compel him to lend his ear to the mellifluent melody which steals out from Molly Johnson’s harem. But he doesn’t draw any nearer, for he knows that Where the Sirens dwell you linger in ease / That their songs are death, but makes destruction please; and he travels on, disgusted with himself because his virtuous life possesses such a skeleton element of fun, yet wonders that such a voluptuous harmony is tolerated by the divine muse of song to issue from such a b-a-d place.”

Reputation aside, its owner set out to prove that good can take root even in such a bad place. The proverbial “hooker with a heart of gold,” Johnson cared for her girls as if they were family. A case example dates from the summer of 1879 when one of Mollie’s favorite girls, Jennie Phillips, fell desperately ill. Author Chris Enss relates the story in her 2023 book An Open Secret. That July 6 Phillips and other girls from the bordello were on a buggy ride in the country when they encountered a tollgate whose owner had chained a feral cat to a tree. When Jennie picked up and tried to soothe the animal, it bit her on the lip, and within days she was bedridden. Though Mollie tended her daily, the young woman died some weeks later.

Beside herself in grief, Mollie had Jennie’s body laid out in a coffin and placed in the parlor of the brothel while she made funeral arrangements.

Then the unthinkable happened: A blaze swept through town, quickly engulfing Mollie’s house of ill repute. Yet the madam refused to evacuate until Jennie’s coffin had been safely removed. The next morning Mollie had Jennie interred in Deadwood’s Mount Moriah Cemetery. By Christmas a new $7,000 brothel had risen from the ashes of the old brothel, and Mollie had donated money to churches to buy presents for needy children.

One Happy Ending… and Many Sad Ones

Most soiled doves dreamed of a better life. Annie Hizer, one of Mollie’s girls, managed to realize her dreams. Known to her clientele as “Little Buttercup,” Annie had a regular customer in Black Hills physician Dr. Charles W. Meyer, and before long the two fell in love and were married. Held at the local opera house on March 7, 1880, their ceremony was a town affair, with city officials and military personnel in attendance. Mollie and her girls served as maids of honor.

But Little Buttercup’s happy ending was the exception rather than the rule. Take, for example, the sad fate of Nellie Stanley, a 23-year-old working girl at Belle Haskell’s brothel, the 400. A polite young Chicagoan with a typically hard backstory, she was somewhat of a loner. On the evening of March 19, 1894, complaining of a headache and sore throat, Nellie retired to her room, where she took an overdose of the painkiller Antikamnia. When fellow working girls found her unconscious, Belle summoned a doctor to the 400, but nothing could be done. Nellie was dead. Those who knew her best were certain she’d committed suicide. Sadly, such was a common occurrence in brothels.

Like other houses of ill repute, Belle Haskell’s 400 was the genesis of other tragedies. When one 1893 love triangle ended in murder, however, even the seasoned madam was shocked. The trouble arose after one of Belle’s girls, 16-year-old Austie Trevyr (born Mary Yusta to a wealthy family in Lincoln, Neb.) took up with gambler Frank DeBelloy, the longtime lover of Gem saloon girl Maggie McDermott. For his part, DeBelloy was content to play both hands.   

That December 17 Austie scrawled out a seemingly innocent invitation to Maggie to join her and Frank for drinks at the local Mascotte saloon. There, in a drunken fit of jealousy, Austie shot and killed Maggie. She was immediately arrested for premeditated murder. At trial the following spring a jury convicted Austie of manslaughter, the judge sentencing her to three years and seven months in the state penitentiary at Sioux Falls, S.D. In 1897 local news reports had the recently sprung Austie first returning to the 400 before leaving that summer for a women’s seminary back East, seemingly a reformed soiled dove.

An Enduring Institution

By 1889 legislators and lawmen across the Dakotas were targeting brothels and gambling dens and the activities that supported them. The South Dakota Legislature struck the first blow that year by outlawing the sale of alcohol, a move anticipating federal Prohibition by three decades. In 1898 Governor Arthur C. Mellette followed up with a provision to the state constitution outlawing gambling and prostitution, but purveyors of such vice simply went underground. By the time Prohibition took effect in 1920, Deadwood’s brothels had gone aboveground, quite literally, in speakeasies up behind painted doorways over respectable businesses on lower Main.

In 1951 law enforcement officials raided Deadwood’s brothels, but demand meant they were soon back in business. In 1952 the state’s attorney for Lawrence County prosecuted the brothel operators in the latest attempt to shut them down. This time the madams hired attorney Roswell Bottum, a former state representative, who managed to get the women acquitted on a technicality. Another raid and round of prosecutions in 1959 also failed to close the brothels.

Not until the spring of 1980 did federal and state authorities working in tandem manage to shut down the last four remaining Deadwood brothels. A group of citizens paraded down Main Street in support of the madams, much like lonesome miners did the day the Utter brothers’ wagon train brought the first sporting girls to town in 1876.

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Linda Wommack, from Littleton, Colo., is the author of several books on Colorado history. For further reading she recommends An Open Secret: The Story of Deadwood’s Most Notorious Bordellos, by Chris Enss and Deadwood History Inc., and Pioneer Days in the Black Hills, by John S. McClintock.

Much has been written about the July 13, 1882, death of Arizona Territory gunfighter Johnny Ringo, most of it wrong. Writers have inserted their assumptions as facts. Thus, the story often goes that Johnny found himself alone in a trackless waste on a hot day in mid-July without water. Despondent, his horse having run off, left without water, Ringo committed suicide.  

In fact, Ringo died within 20 yards of a well-traveled road, having just reached Turkey Creek, the first available water source within many miles. He was within a quarter mile of the ranch of B.F. Smith, in the western foothills of the Chiricahua Mountains, and those on the ranch heard the shot that killed Johnny. Furthermore, July is a month of monsoon rains. In Arizona that means the wind comes from the southwest, from the Pacific and Gulf of California, bringing almost daily thundershowers that fill ponds and cause washes and streams to run. The rain cools the land, which at Turkey Creek is at 5,400 feet elevation—a far cry from the blazing desert around Phoenix, at 1,100 feet.   

As the Epitaph account reveals, Yost estimated that within a quarter hour 11 men were on the scene. They comprised a “coroner’s jury.” That term may mislead present-day readers. These were 11 everyday men who reported their findings to the coroner in Tombstone by letter. They had no forensic training. They were in a hurry to be done with the affair and get back to work, to bury a body already starting to stink. They did not wish to be called to Tombstone, miles distant, for lengthy court proceedings.  

Ringo was known to several of the men. The Epitaph published their findings. Johnny was found in a seated posture leaning against a tree. His boots were missing. “He was dressed in [a] light hat, blue shirt, vest, pants and drawers. On his feet were a pair of hose and an undershirt torn up so as to protect his feet.” He wore two cartridge belts, one for pistol and one for rifle. The revolver belt was upside down. There was no holster for a pistol, nor was it a Buscadero rig. His rifle propped against a nearby tree, his pistol clasped in his right hand. There was a bullet hole atop the left side of his skull. “A part of the scalp [was] gone,” the paper noted, “and part of the hair. This looks as if cut out by a knife.” There was no mention of powder burns or stippling on his head.

Black powder burns slowly and keeps burning as the bullet emerges from the barrel. In his 1966 song “Mr. Shorty,” Marty Robbins sang, “The .44 spoke, and it sent lead and smoke, and 17 inches of flame.” This isn’t far off the mark. A close-range pistol shot with muzzle held to temple likely would have ignited Ringo’s hair and left an awful mess. The coroner’s jury might have left such details out of their report to spare family members and the public, or perhaps because they simply didn’t think it important. After all, the effects of close-range pistol shots was common knowledge in that era.  

The Epitaph report surmised the circumstances:  

“The general impression prevailing among people in the Chiricahuas is that his horse wandered off somewhere, and he started off on foot to search for him; that his boots began to hurt him, and he pulled them off and made moccasins of his undershirt. He could not have been suffering for water, as he was within 200 feet of it, and not more than 700 feet from Smith’s house. Mrs. Morse and Mrs. Young passed by where he was lying Thursday afternoon, but supposed it was some man asleep and took no further notice of him. The inmates of Smith’s house heard a shot about 3 o’clock Thursday evening, and it is more than likely that that is the time the rash deed was done. He was on an extended jamboree the last time he was in this city.”  

The following Tuesday Ringo’s horse was found with one of his boots still hanging from the saddle. The Chiricahua folks were mistaken. Johnny hadn’t, while searching for his horse, taken off his boots because they hurt. He still had the horse when he took them off. The strips of undershirt wrapped around his feet were clean, not dirtied by any walking about. He was close to water and aid, not helpless and alone in a desert. The newspaper also noted Ringo was subject to frequent melancholy and had abnormal fear of being killed. He was paranoid, but that doesn’t mean people weren’t pursuing him with the intent to do him harm.  

What Really Happened on Turkey Creek?

The spot where Ringo was found, sitting beneath an oak tree on the banks of upper Turkey Creek, is idyllic, shaded and alive with the sound of trickling water. Though peaceful, it was not at all secluded. It was on the road to Galeyville, which passed a nearby pinery and sawmill. Several passersby spotted Johnny’s body, each believing he was only resting.

In his 1927 book Tombstone: An Iliad of the Southwest author Walter Noble Burns added several details. “[Ringo’s] six-shooter, held in his right hand, had fallen into his lap and caught in his watch chain,” Burns wrote. “Five chambers of the cylinder were loaded; the hammer rested on the single empty shell.” Of course, Burns was writing an adventure tale and not a history. Nonetheless, some four decades after Johnny’s death he did conduct research in Tombstone and Cochise County, speaking to people who had direct knowledge of the events.

The spent cartridge may mean Ringo had fired the fatal shot. However, it could easily be symptomatic of resting the hammer on a spent cartridge for safety. As a young Wyatt Earp once learned to his chagrin, resting the hammer on a live cartridge could lead to accidental discharge of the weapon; in his case, as he leaned back in a chair, his revolver tumbled from the holster and landed on the floor. That Johnny’s pistol was resting in his lap, tangled in his watch chain, is more intriguing. It’s hard to imagine the pistol, had he shot himself, falling in that position instead of at his side. Forensic studies show that suicides often continue to grip the weapon, so that by itself is not evidence of postmortem tampering by a third party. As Ringo lacked a holster for his pistol, he must have worn it tucked beneath his cartridge belt. Thus, in a seated position, it might well have become tangled as he tried to draw.

There is much peculiar in how Johnny was clad. He’d taken off his boots and hung them from the saddle of his horse, which wandered off. He’d also taken the time to strip off cartridge belts, vest and shirt, then removed and torn up his undershirt to bind his feet. Walking barefoot in Arizona is a painful experience at best. Stones, cacti and stiff grass, not to mention various critters and the hot ground, make such barefoot forays ill-advised. Cowboys do not, as some have written, hang their boots from the saddle to keep out scorpions. On reaching a destination, they remove the saddle from the horse, placing it on the ground, and then wipe down the horse with dry grass. Moreover, Johnny had re-dressed himself, buckling on his cartridge belts (one upside down) and binding his feet as if preparing to pursue his horse.

That leaves the question of why he took off his boots in the first place. Let’s consider his situation. He’d been on an extended spree in Tombstone. When friend Billy Breakenridge met Ringo at South Pass in the Dragoons, Johnny had two bottles of whiskey and offered Billy a drink. By the time he was approaching Turkey Creek, Ringo had crossed many dry miles and was either severely hungover or still drunk. He and his horse both needed a drink of cool water. It seems likely Ringo took off his boots and hung them from the saddle to keep them dry while he waded into the creek to cool his feet and splash water on his face. Likewise, the horse would have waded in for a drink.

What came next is an educated guess. The horse panicked and broke away at some sound in the dense brush. It might have been a bear or someone stalking Ringo. In any event, Johnny had to chase down his horse and didn’t care to do that barefoot. He climbed the steep bank to the tree where he was found, undressed himself to remove his undershirt and then re-dressed, wrapping his feet in preparation for a long walk.

At that moment one of two things occurred. Suddenly despairing of catching his horse, Ringo resolved to kill himself. He must have been certain succor would not have been available at Smith’s ranch or from the many passersby. Alternatively, the noise from the brush that had startled his horse might have been someone stalking him. That someone climbed the bank while Ringo was distracted with his clothing. Hearing the approach of a stranger, Johnny reached for his pistol. The stranger, still only partway up the slope, fired upward from a distance of 10 feet or more, striking Ringo in the temple, the bullet emerging from the top of his skull. The stranger then took out his knife and carved off part of Johnny’s scalp as a trophy.

Who Could Have Done It?

The above proposed scenario for Ringo’s final hour accounts for all the evidence, providing a logical explanation for much that was odd in how he was found. As to whether Johnny suddenly decided to kill himself after losing his horse or was killed by a third party, who can say? Murder seems plausible, maybe likely.

There are many candidates for Ringo’s murderer. Some think Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday might have been responsible. They could have been there. If Constable Fred Dodge, acting as their spy in Tombstone, had telegraphed that Johnny was on a binge and would soon return to Galeyville and his San Simon ranch, there would have been time for Earp and Holliday to travel over by train, especially given Johnny’s circuitous ride home. Even taking an indirect route, the pair could have made the trip by train. The mouth of Turkey Creek was a choke point, by which Ringo would have passed within a few hundred feet. However, a secret only remains a secret if only one person knows it. Wyatt and Doc surely would have been recognized as they left the train. Many co-conspirators would have to have been brought in on such a plan.

Most other candidates seem even less likely, due to implausible motives. Except for Buckskin Frank Leslie.

Leslie appears nowhere in the historical record before 1878. He arrived in Tombstone in 1880, a man in his late 30s who had adopted the persona of an Army scout, which he claimed to have been for more than a decade. Yet, there is no evidence he was a scout before moving to Tombstone. Buckskin Frank was a congenial sort of fellow around the campfire, which probably accounts for his acceptance as a scout on later expeditions. In 1885 he was hired to guide Captain Emmet Crawford’s command in pursuit of Geronimo but was, according to Los Angeles Times reporter Charles F. Lummis, “directly discharged because of his inability to tell a trail from a box of flea powder.” Leslie also served as a dispatch rider, bringing “wildcat dispatches” to Tombstone, his presumed skill scoffed at by Crawford’s superior, Brig. Gen. George Crook.

Lummis, who met Frank in Tombstone, probably had the right of it in his 1886 Times article:

“Leslie is a peculiar case—one of the types of a class not infrequently met on the frontier. A man apparently well educated, gentlemanly and liked by all who know him; with as much “sand” as the country he ranges—but a novelist who can make a little truth go as far as anyone in the territory.”

In the spring of 1880, a few weeks after Cosmopolitan Hotel chambermaid Mary Jane “May” Evans married, she took up with Leslie—neither, apparently, being respecters of the sanctity of matrimony. That June 22 May’s husband, Mike Killeen, was mortally wounded—probably by Frank, though under confusing circumstances—and scarcely a week later May was Mrs. Frank Leslie. The marriage was not a happy one, as Frank, a womanizer, strayed. Perhaps May had seen through the false front and threatened his he-man persona. That might explain the abuse she suffered at his hands.

In 1881, while Earp and friend Holliday temporarily cooled their heels in jail after the gunfight near the O.K. Corral, Doc’s longtime companion Big Nose Kate twice gave Ringo a tumble. Johnny, too, was no respecter of other men’s territory, and the following spring he and Frank were at loggerheads over a woman.

In July 1882, as Ringo returned from his extended spree in Tombstone, witnesses spotted Leslie trailing him near Turkey Creek. That November 14 Johnny’s friend Billy Claiborne, who’d fled from the O.K. Corral fracas, picked a gunfight with Leslie after Frank ejected him from a saloon for obnoxious drunkenness. Claiborne ended up dead in that fight. At the time some said Billy had accused Frank of killing Ringo, while years later multiple sources claimed Leslie boasted of having killed Ringo. Taking a scalp trophy would have fit right in with his persona.

Leslie’s life only took a downturn from there. By 1889 he and May had divorced, and Frank had absconded to his ranch in the Swisshelms with former prostitute “Blonde Mollie” Edwards, a younger woman. That July 10, on returning home after a spree, Frank entered the ranch house to find Mollie and a young ranch hand in discussion. Drawing his gun, Frank killed Mollie and wounded the ranch hand. No motive was given, but Mollie had mentioned wanting to return to “city life” in Tombstone, and perhaps 40-something Frank was feeling his age and believed she was sweet on the boy. Though no respecter of other men’s prerogatives, Frank was jealous of his own. Pleading guilty to first-degree murder, he was transported to Yuma Territorial Prison in January 1890. On Nov. 17, 1896, having serving nearly seven years behind bars, Leslie was pardoned by Arizona Territory Governor Benjamin J. Franklin.

In 1916, after two decades of further adventures and failed marriages, Buckskin Frank Leslie was interviewed by a reporter from The Seattle Daily Times. He stated his age as 74 and said he was planning a trip to Mexico. When and where he died is anyone’s guess, as he vanished from the record as suddenly as he’d appeared on it.   

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For further reading, author Doug Hocking recommends “Buckskin Frank” Leslie, by Don Chaput; They Called Him Buckskin Frank, by Jack DeMattos and Chuck Parsons; and John Peters Ringo: Mythical Gunfighter, by Ben T. Traywick.

There’s an element of truth to the maxim “the hat makes the man.” In the 19th century West, for example, certain headgear served to identify their wearers at a glance. Soldiers had the shako, firefighters the leatherhead, Indians the warbonnet and vaqueros the sombrero. But perhaps no other topper in history has symbolized a people and their region in such a defining way as the cowboy hat. See it stamped on a box, in neon outside a storefront or in a popular present-day email “emoji,” and one immediately thinks of the American West.

Yet, the cowboy hat wasn’t the most prolific lid of its time or place. In a 1957 editorial headlined The Hat That Won the West, in Salt Lake City’s Deseret News, writer-historian Lucius Beebe disputed that the cowboy hat was ubiquitous out West, a notion he deemed an invention of artist Frederic Remington. “The authentic hat of the Old West,” Beebe wrote, “was the cast-iron derby, the bowler of Old Bond Street and the chapeau melon of French usage.” He then pointed to such derby wearers as lawman Bat Masterson, stagecoach robber Charles E. “Black Bart” Boles, Wells Fargo chief detective James B. Hume and, tellingly, “Remington and his imitators” as proof of his assertion.

Regardless, the cowboy hat remains the iconic symbol of the West. And the name that has become synonymous with it is Stetson. Ironically, John B. Stetson was an Easterner, and the factory that initially steamed, shaped and shipped tens of millions of hats bearing his name was in Philadelphia, though the company that produces them under license today is, fittingly, in Texas.

Stetson (1830–1906), the son of a New Jersey hatmaker, was diagnosed with tuberculosis as a young man and resolved to close up the family shop and venture West for the climate and to see its vaunted beauty before dying. In 1861 news of the Pikes Peak Gold Rush drew him and fellow hopefuls to the Colorado goldfields. Stetson arrived, so the story goes, amid heavy downpours and so crafted a beaver felt hat of his own design to keep dry. It featured the trademark wide brim, high crown and waterproof lining since associated with his name. The style proved so popular among the Western outdoorsmen Stetson encountered that the emboldened entrepreneur returned East in 1865 to resume hatmaking.

The first design off the line in his Philadelphia factory was the “Boss of the Plains” (see above). It proved instantly popular and dominated the market for the next couple of decades. As Stetson owners took to adding personalized touches—a dent here or a curved brim there—the company took note and rolled out additional styles.

Stetson got a big boost in the 1880s with the advent of international celebrity in the person of William Frederick Cody. Cody was already a fan of Stetsons, custom versions of which he wore onstage in the early 1870s in touring productions organized by dime novelist Ned Buntline. Within a few years of launching his own Wild West arena shows in 1883, Buffalo Bill was plastering his Stetson-capped image on signboards from San Francisco to Saxony. The hatmaker couldn’t buy better advertising.

The birth of the silver screen and its Western stars further amplified the popularity of the Stetson, one of which the company named for the actor who made it popular—the Tom Mix.

Today the cowboy hat endures, and scores of hatmakers big and small continue to craft styles that symbolize the Old and New West. We trace its history below.

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The year 1870 was a time of war on the northwest Texas frontier. Kiowa and Comanche raiders striking out of the vast southern Plains punished the line of Anglo settlement as it inexorably pushed its way north and west. The Indians felt compelled to lash out, given renewed postwar encroachment into their lands, unfair or broken treaty agreements, the impending specter of forced reservation life and their own intertribal politics. The U.S. Army was likewise compelled to maintain peace and safety for its citizens on the Texas frontier.

For 15 years one of the hottest spots in this unrelenting contest was sparsely populated Jack County, up near the Red River in north-central Texas. Settlers there were usually the first to suffer with the coming of each full moon, and their protests and cries for protection had resulted in 1868 in the establishment of a military post, Fort Richardson, on the outskirts of the county seat, Jacksboro. If the settlers thought their problems were solved, however, they were soon bitterly disappointed.   

Fort Richardson became the headquarters of the 6th U.S. Cavalry, a regiment that boasted a far thicker record of desertions than of Indian fights. Over its 39-month tenure at the fort the regiment sent out 26 full-scale scouting parties, but only five intercepted Indian raiders, resulting in the deaths of three troopers and unknown casualties to the warriors. During that same period Indian raiders killed or captured more than 200 settlers and drove off thousands of head of livestock. The 6th seemed powerless to prevent such depredations. The carnage reached a crescendo in June 1870 when raiders killed another 15 settlers. Letters, protests and petitions flew from the pens of the settlers to both the officers at Fort Richardson and the government in Washington, D.C. How could the vanquishers of the Confederacy be so ineffective against a few hundred poorly armed Indians?

Aggravating the situation was the fact that in the wake of the Civil War, Washington had forbidden the re-formation of the Texas Rangers, the one group that had had some success against the southern Plains Indians. Stung by the continual criticism and charges that soldiers trained only for the parade ground were no match for veteran warriors adept at guerrilla warfare, the officers of the 6th waited and watched for any opportunity to restore their honor and morale in the ranks.

Whether they were ready or not, opportunity came knocking.

“A Galling Fire from All Sides”

In early July a party of more than 100 Kiowa warriors crossed the Red River into Texas from Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). It was led by Kicking Bird (or Eagle Striking With Talons, as his name has been translated more recently), among the best-known war leaders on the southern Plains. Long distinguished among the Kiowa for his courage and military prowess, he was also a signatory of both the 1865 Little Arkansas Treaty and the 1867 Medicine Lodge Treaty. He even had admirers among the Anglos. “Though a wild, untutored savage,” one Indian agent wrote of the chief, “he was a man of fine native sense, and thoroughly educated in the habits of his people, and determined to make a reputation for himself, not in bad acts, but in elevating his people.” Kicking Bird was perhaps second in influence only to the acknowledged principal chief, Lone Wolf.

In more recent years, however, Kicking Bird had spoken once too often of seeking peaceful accord with the whites, prompting the more radical elements among the Kiowa to question his abilities and fitness to lead. Some warriors went so far as to claim that his consorting with white men had made him a coward and a traitor. To restore his honor, Kicking Bird agreed to lead a major war party against the white soldiers, and the men of Fort Richardson were selected as the target, mainly because they were the only force in north Texas opposing the southern Plains Indians.

According to Indian participants interviewed in the 1920s at Fort Sill, Okla., by Colonel Wilbur Sturtevant Nye, no warrior was supposed to leave the war party to steal. Yet, on July 5 a handful of Kiowas attacked a mail wagon at Rock Station, 16 miles west of Fort Richardson. A challenge to the Army thus delivered, the 6th Cavalry quickly responded. At the head of two officers, one surgeon and 53 enlisted men culled from six companies of the 6th, Captain Curwen B. McLellan led out his men on July 6 with orders to “pursue and severely chastise the Indians.”

Born in Scotland, McLellan (no relation to Union commander Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan) was a veteran of the Civil War. Commended for his bravery and tactical skill at Gettysburg, he’d received a brevet promotion to major, only to revert in rank to captain amid the general postwar reduction of the Army. It would seem fate had chosen a worthy opponent for Kicking Bird.

At Rock Creek Station scouts picked up the trail of eight to 10 Kiowa warriors. Slowed by heavy rains and rough terrain, the column followed the trail northwest, McLellan assuming the raiders intended to slip across the Red River into Indian Territory, where, by federal edict, the troopers were forbidden to follow. Only, this band of Indians had no intention of fleeing. On the contrary, the captain and his men were being drawn into an ambush on ground of Kicking Bird’s choosing.

McLellan’s error is understandable. Like most Civil War officers, he’d been trained and disciplined to fight 19th century set-piece battles. But such an approach could only end in frustration on the frontier, as Plains Indians were seldom willing to engage in straight-up fights. Instead, they relied on their advantages of surprise and mobility, employing mostly hit-and-run tactics before withdrawing to their Oklahoma reservations as an untouchable home base. Thus, many Army officers had come to regard patrols sent in pursuit of Indian raiders as mere exercises in herding the hostiles back across the Red River, dismissing warnings of the Indians’ skill in preparing ambushes. McLellan would pay dearly for such a miscalculation.

On July 9 the captain resumed his march northwest to the headwaters of the South Fork of the Little Wichita River, where his scouts found the mail wagon driver’s whip and an indistinct trail leading west. Continuing northwest past the headwaters of the Middle Fork, McLellan and his men soon reached a bluff on the south bank of the North Fork. As the heavy rains had obscured all signs of the raiders’ ponies and rendered the North Fork impassable, McLellan ordered his men into camp, where they remained until July 12.

Around 11 that morning, an hour after decamping, the advance guard encountered what appeared to be a Kiowa scouting party. Anticipating that the main body of Indians was nearby, McLellan had his troopers form ranks, unfurl their banners, unsling their weapons and advance at a quick trot, soon outstripping the column’s packtrain, loaded with ammunition and supplies. After covering about a half mile, the troopers spotted a large band of Kiowas some 1,000 yards distant. McLellan had found Kicking Bird—or, rather, Kicking Bird had allowed himself to be found. The captain had closed within 500 yards of the Kiowas when two other bands, together equaling the first in strength, popped up on his flanks, threatening to cut off his packtrain and rear guard, which had fallen some 400 yards behind. Realizing he could no longer safely move forward, McLellan ordered his troopers to open fire.

At that point Kicking Bird ordered a full-scale charge on three sides. The Kiowas attacked with a ferocity for which the troopers of the 6th were unprepared. Years later warriors who participated in the battle reported that Kicking Bird rode at the head of his men and counted first coup by impaling a soldier on his lance. Surely McLellan would have reported such a dramatic action, yet there is no mention of it in his after-action report. Embarrassment is one possible explanation. That an Indian could ride into the face of more than 50 professional soldiers, kill one with a lance and slip away unscathed would be a distressing event. Whether it happened or not, the Kiowas clearly had the upper hand. For a half hour the troopers endured what McLellan called “a galling fire from all sides,” at which point it became apparent the command was in danger of being overrun. It must have dawned on the captain how far he had ventured from any defensible position or any possible help—in other words, how perfect the battlefield was for Kicking Bird.

The pursuer had become the pursued. McLellan realized that the only way to preserve his command from “total annihilation” was to retreat.

Desperate Retreat

McLellan dismounted his men, every fourth trooper holding the reins of the mounts while the other three fired between the horses. They formed a box around the packtrain, with roughly 10 men to a side and a 10-man reserve in the middle, and began to effect what McLellan described in reports as “an orderly withdrawal,” but which in truth was a desperate fight for survival. Many of the Indians were armed with Spencer repeating rifles, which complemented their mounted tactics perfectly. The men of the 6th were using the single-shot breech-loading Springfield trapdoor carbine, a weapon with a comparatively slow rate of fire, though it could send a bullet up to 400 yards downrange with accuracy and power. As a result, the Kiowas kept their distance, swarming first around one flank and then another, several times forming up to block the troopers’ line of retreat. McLellan frantically redeployed his men to meet each threat that arose, but his casualties were mounting and his ammunition waning.   For some four and a half hours under a hot July sun Kicking Bird mercilessly drove the 6th Cavalry over the plains and back down across the North and Middle forks of the Little Wichita, pouring a constant and devastating fire on the bluecoats from all sides.

Kicking Bird maintained a strong, steady pursuit by keeping three-fourths of his men engaged while holding the others in reserve, then steadily replacing tired warriors with fresh ones from the reserve. The unrelenting stream of strikes by seemingly tireless Indians surprised McLellan and his officers, who found it all they could do to hold their own while retreating.

Around 4 p.m. the captain and his exhausted troopers forded the South Fork of the Little Wichita, at which point Kicking Bird called for his warriors to abandon the pursuit, confident his honor had been restored. The Kiowas had killed or wounded nearly a quarter of McLellan’s command and nearly half his horses.

Though no longer under fire, McLellan felt his position remained untenable, so he ordered his men to continue the southeasterly retreat toward Fort Richardson. Ultimately, however, sheer mental and physical fatigue forced the 6th Cavalry into camp within sight of Flat Top Mountain.

Early the next morning, July 13, McLellan dispatched couriers to Fort Richardson, requesting ambulances for the wounded. But his intention to remain encamped until the ambulances arrived was thwarted when a band of several dozen Kiowas attacked and drove in the pickets. Fearing that Kicking Bird’s entire war party was close at hand, the captain ordered all supplies burned and his weary men to saddle up the remaining horses and begin another forced retreat. After resting a few hours at Rocky Station, the scene of the attack on the mail stage a week prior, the command continued southeast toward Fort Richardson. Meeting the ambulances en route, the battered column went into camp that night, arriving back at the garrison at noon on July 14.

Saving Face

In his after-action report McLellan listed two men killed and 11 wounded, and eight horses killed and 21 wounded. Though he had obviously suffered a humiliating rout, the captain estimated far higher enemy losses, claimed the expedition had been a “perfect success” and insisted he had “taught them a lesson they will not soon forget.” A far less rosy assessment was reported by his troopers, however, many of whom were incensed that McLellan had abandoned the two slain enlisted men’s bodies during his retreat.

In the aftermath Fort Richardson post surgeon Dr. Julius H. Patzki interviewed members of the command. One constant in his report was the emphatic bafflement of troopers to the overwhelming demonstration of military skill by Kicking Bird and his warriors. “The systematic strategy displayed by the savages, exhibiting an almost civilized mode of skirmish fighting, struck the officers and men engaged,” Patzki wrote. It was a compliment McLellan could never pay Kicking Bird.

The Army praised the captain for having kept his command from being wiped out, and 13 members of the 6th Cavalry later received the Medal of Honor for “gallantry in action at the North Fork of the Little Wichita River.” Thus, McLellan, like Kicking Bird, managed to save face.

The events along the Little Wichita served to demonstrate warriors were capable of far more cunning than their stereotypical “savage” reputation implied. Kicking Bird’s systematic and precise formations were those only the most adept tacticians are able to pull off in the heat of battle. He executed his ambush and flanking maneuvers with a striking ease that overwhelmed the rigid professional tactics of the 6th Cavalry and did so with minimal loss. Kiowa participants later insisted no warriors had been killed. That said, tribal society was highly stratified, and the loss of a low-ranking warrior might not have warranted mention in their oral history.

Kicking Bird had set out to restore his honor in action against the bluecoats, and he succeeded. Expressing regret that he’d resorted to violence, he never again rode into battle against the soldiers, instead preaching the road of peace. After the 1874–75 Red River War the Army gave him the onerous task of selecting the requisite Kiowa warriors and chiefs who would be sent to prison in Florida. Among the exiles was the powerful medicine man Maman-ti, who threatened Kicking Bird. “You remain free, a big man with the whites, but you will not live long,” he vowed. “I will see to that.” Kicking Bird had told an Anglo friend his heart was as a stone, broken in two. “I am grieved,” he said, “at the ruin of my people.” Two days later the chief died at his camp under mysterious circumstances. While some Kiowas claimed it was the curse of Maman-ti, Army doctors suspected poison.

McLellan never led another major expedition in Texas. Within nine months of its fiasco on the Little Wichita the 6th Cavalry was transferred to Kansas and replaced by a more vigorous unit, the 4th Cavalry, led by the legendary hard-charging Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie. With its arrival the people of north Texas would finally get their protection from the Indians.

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Allen Lee Hamilton, a history professor at St. Philip’s College in San Antonio, is the author of six books, a novel and numerous magazine articles. His eldest son, Clinton Chase Hamilton, holds a master’s degree in history from Texas State University. For further reading they suggest Sentinel of the Southern Plains: Fort Richardson and the Northwest Texas Frontier, 1866–1878, by Allen Lee Hamilton; Carbine and Lance: The Story of Old Fort Sill, by Colonel W.S. Nye; and Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay: The Enlisted Soldier Fighting the Indian Wars, by Don Rickey Jr.

The historical record contains a wealth of primary sources from the early days of Deadwood, Dakota Territory. Images and paperwork of all stripes are extant both online and in physical archives. Lacking have been fuller profiles of the town’s various and sundry characters, divorced from the legends that many worked to craft for themselves. One such character of note is Ellis Albert “Al” Swearingen, who is most closely associated with Deadwood but met his demise in Denver on Nov. 15, 1904.   

Al and twin brother Lemuel Swearingen were born in Oskaloosa, Iowa, on July 8, 1845. Their parents, Daniel and Keziah Swearingen, were farmers who would eventually establish a prosperous walnut grove near Yankton, S.D. By the spring of 1876 Al had moved to the gold boomtown of Deadwood, where he soon started the Gem saloon. Completed the following year, the Gem served as a bar, variety theater, brothel and the headquarters of Swearingen’s own corrupt fiefdom that for several years ruled over many aspects of underlife in the burgeoning community. In 1887 Nebraska’s Omaha Daily Bee reported that Swearingen had forcibly detained without pay at the Gem two married stage performers from Omaha, prompting their husbands to petition Deadwood Mayor Sol Star for their release. According to one of Al’s contemporaries, chronicler John S. McClintock, the profits the Gem brought effectively blinded Deadwood’s most prominent citizens to Swearingen’s boundless corruption. Death eventually tracked him down in Denver. Newspaper accounts suggest he fell off a streetcar or train while trundling about the Colorado capital, though the weight of evidence points to a darker demise.  

Certainly, Swearingen was reviled by many who would have wanted him dead, not least the women who found themselves in his orbit. Driven by a lust for power and wealth, he had no compassion, even when it came to romantic partners. In 1889, for example, a Deadwood judge issued a warrant for Swearingen’s arrest after he’d brutally beaten his second wife and threatened to cut her throat with a straight razor. He avoided justice that time by skipping town for Omaha. It wasn’t an unprecedented assault. In 1879 Swearingen had been arrested, fined $50 and put under a $500 bond after having badly beaten first wife Nettie, the Black Hills Weekly Pioneer reporting that her face had been “pounded almost to a jelly.” The Oct. 25, 1884, edition of the Carbonate Chronicle, in Leadville, Colo., recounted Nellie’s life of abuse at her by then ex-husband’s hands. “He was jealous of the girl’s pretty face,” the paper alleged, “accused her of infidelity when there was no proof of it and beat her without cause.”  

While most women of the period had few options beyond motherhood and prostitution, Nettie had found success in the early 1870s as a member of a troupe of variety players. Unfortunately, in 1875 a gunman named Edward Frodsham shot Nettie’s husband, Charles Peasley, to death in front of her at a Wyoming Territory bar. Within months she met and married Swearingen, then working as a bartender at a joint in Laramie. After a stint operating a dance hall in Custer City, Dakota Territory, he and Nettie ended up in the frontier morass known as Deadwood. Meanwhile, the beatings continued.  

In 1880 she escaped, far worse for the wear, and landed in Leadville, another boomtown with a deficit of humanity. An article in the Carbonate Chronicle stated she became a “ward” of one Albert Marshman, though what that relationship entailed it didn’t specify. Another article in the same edition reported Nettie was afflicted by dropsy, a buildup of fluid in the body since associated with ailments such as liver disease. By October 1884 Swearingen’s 30-year-old abused ex was dead by way of whiskey and morphine.  

Swearingen appears to have left Deadwood soon after the Gem burned down in 1899. According to the Denver Post, he spent several years prospecting around Leadville and taking odd agricultural jobs in the potato fields before pushing on to Denver. Mortuary owner William P. Horan was the latter city’s official coroner from 1900 to ’18 and would have been on hand that fateful day in mid-November 1904 when Swearingen’s body was brought in. Turn-of-the-century coroner’s reports are awash in drug overdoses, liver disease, violence and suicide, and the last record of Swearingen was no less dark.  

Acquaintances in Denver had known him as “Albert Ellis,” an alias he likely adopted as cover from past associates looking to do him harm. The month before Al’s death twin brother Lemuel, a successful butcher and former councilman back in hometown Oskaloosa, Iowa, was shot five times, it was thought in a case of mistaken identity. Lemuel survived, but Al ran out of luck.  

According to the coroner’s inquest, the body was found at the Denver & Rio Grande railroad crossing on Alameda Boulevard. His crushed legs, broken ribs and fractured skull were consistent with a fall from a train, though the injuries also seem consistent with having been beaten to death. At the time no one directly suggested foul play, but a Rocky Mountain News article from October 17, a month before Swearingen’s death, reported he was to testify against former friend John Allison for having stolen $45 from Al after the pair worked the potato fields together in Eden, Colo.  

The circumstances of Swearingen’s death may never come to light. What is certain, however, is that he did not die abed in Deadwood as the HBO series of that name portrayed. The day after his death the Denver Post had the last word in an article headlined Old Prospector Is Killed by a Train. It painted a rather pathetic picture. Swearingen had recently been released from county jail for vagrancy. His meager belongings amounted to a cheap watch and, bizarrely, some dynamite and blasting caps. Also found on his body was an unsent letter addressed to an R.T. Wilson, asking to be brought tobacco in jail. Authorities turned over his loose items to Wilson, while his remains eventually found their way home to his family in Oskaloosa for burial.  

It’s hard to convey how close to the bone life was for Westerners who found themselves on the wrong end of the booms and busts. Equally difficult is separating legend from reality with regard to the characters who made the West wild. Characters like Swearingen and the women who fell under his sway are a good reminder that much of the savagery on the frontier was omitted from the first drafts of history. 

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Cephas William “Dick” Parr (1843–1911) never achieved the fame of fellow scout turned showman William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody, though judging by this 1890s publicity photo, Dick struck as dashing a figure. His name is also linked to one of the most storied fights of the Indian wars. In 1900 his third wife, Louise (née Lincoln) Parr, published a fantastical biography that claims Dick was raised by legendary Indian fighter William Harney, captured at age 12 and adopted by the Sioux, and bailed out James Butler Hickok in 1861 after “Wild Bill” killed his first man. At the Sept. 17–19, 1868, Battle of Beecher Island, it continues, Dick not only fought as one of Major George Forsyth’s vaunted scouts, but also held namesake Lieutenant Frederick Beecher as the latter lay dying. Along the way he reportedly served as chief scout for U.S. Army icons Alfred Sully, Winfield Scott Hancock, George Armstrong Custer and Philip Sheridan. Problem is, few of the claims pass muster. “A thorough search of the records,” reads the paperwork for a 1904 pension claim on Parr’s behalf, “fails to disclose any record of the alleged service.” Yet, quixotically, Congress approved the pension.

Turns out Parr did at very least serve as post scout at Fort Hays under Sheridan and Custer in 1868. In the leadup to Beecher Island he pinpointed several hostile Indian villages and advised Forsyth on the selection of his scouts. Dick also loaned the scouts six of his own horses, though he didn’t join the campaign. Still, according to the pension claim Parr suffered from arrow and gunshot wounds received in action at Fort Hays. For the next 20 years he knocked about the West before heading east to settle in, of all places, Brooklyn, N.Y. Parr spent the balance of his life touring in Western garb with his own Rocky Mountain Dick Amusement Company and regaling all who would listen with his exploits, real and imagined. 

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Often overlooked in the history of firearms out West was the H&R line of revolvers, innovative spur-trigger models with origins back East. In 1871 Massachusetts-based gunmakers Gilbert H. Harrington and Frank Wesson (brother of Daniel B. Wesson of Smith & Wesson fame) formed a short-lived partnership under the name Wesson & Harrington. Four years later Wesson branched out on his own and sold his shares to Harrington. By 1876 Harrington and former Wesson employee William A. Richardson had forged the namesake partnership destined to become one of the longest surviving firearms manufacturers in the region, though not until 1888 did Harrington & Richardson Arms Co. formally incorporate in Worcester, Mass.  

Starting up production in 1877, H&R produced untold millions of revolvers, from early single-action models using rimfire cartridges to later double-action models using .32 and .38 Smith & Wesson centerfire cartridges. The H&R line expanded and improved over time, making both solid-frame and top-break revolvers.   

Small-frame pocket “wheel guns” were popular in the Old West, most often as an extra measure of life insurance. By the late 1870s the double-action revolver came into vogue. As a shooter no longer needed to cock the hammer before each shot, such revolvers were considered the “semiautomatics” of their day. H&R entered the scene with its five- or six-shot Model 1880 solid-frame double-action revolver in .32 and .38 S&W calibers. By decade’s end the company’s top-break models had become the mainstays of its line.  

Among H&R’s leading competitors, Smith & Wesson had pioneered the top-break action in the United States with its larger .44 S&W Russian and American and .45 S&W Schofield models, which ejected empty cases out of the cylinder on opening to reload—a welcome time (and, potentially, life) saver. Another of S&W’s revolutionary double-action revolvers was its small-frame safety hammerless revolver. Introduced in 1887, the design caught on.  

Already at work on a similar design, H&R soon patented its own hammerless revolver with enough internal differences to avoid any infringement on S&W’s model. The latter’s version was nicknamed the “lemon squeezer,” a moniker eventually applied to all hammerless double-action models.  

As the Old West gave way to the turn of the century, such small-frame double-action revolvers appealed to many a ranch hand who, given weight considerations and tamer times, had grown weary of lugging around heavier hardware. In photographs of settlers bound for the Cherokee Strip land run in 1893 one can spot, in addition to the standard Sharps or Spencer rifle, small-frame double-action revolvers in many a holster. Messengers and detectives with Wells Fargo & Co. and other favorite targets of highwaymen were also fond of carrying a top-break small-frame double-action revolver or two. A period of especially brisk sales for H&R accompanied the 1896–99 Klondike Gold Rush to the District of Alaska and Yukon Territory. Presumably for protection against such ne’er-do-wells as notorious con man Soapy Smith and cohorts, scores of gold seekers carried the low-cost H&R hammerless double-action revolver. By then the company had plenty of competition in the small-frame revolver niche from such respected makers as Hopkins & Allen, Forehand & Wadsworth, Iver Johnson and Thames Arms. Among other noted users, Frank Hamer—the famed Texas Ranger who finally stopped Depression-era outlaw duo Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, killing them from ambush near Gibsland, La., on May 23, 1934—carried a small-frame, five-shot, .38-caliber double-action pocket revolver in addition to full-size sidearms.  

Though the patent for H&R’s hammerless safety revolver dates from 1895, it is difficult to date individual guns, as the company used run-on serial numbers and didn’t keep meticulous records. In addition to its popular revolvers, H&R also produced single- and double-barrel shotguns, including the first American-made hammerless double-barreled shotgun based on the British Anson & Deeley action, as well as the single-shot “Handy-Gun,” a short-barreled shotgun with a pistol grip that was dropped from production in 1934 following passage of the National Firearms Act, which outlawed such “gangsterish” configurations. H&R was among the few American firearms manufacturers with unprecedented longevity. It continued to produce well-made, no-frills guns for the money until shuttering its doors in 1986 after more than a century in business.

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Bullets zipped by him like a thunderstorm gone frenetic, whistling past his ears and slamming into the crumbling walls overhead. Minutes earlier the young Hispanic had bolted across the plaza to hole up in the tiny wood-and-adobe jacal—meager refuge from the coming hail of lead. Over the next 36 hours more than 4,000 rounds of ammunition would riddle the structure, tearing away parts of the house. Eight slugs were later pried from a broom handle.

Yet through it all the teen survived unscathed.

In late October 1884, in a dramatic display of skill, spunk and luck, unimposing 5-foot-7 19-year-old Elfego Baca instigated and prevailed in what was likely the most unequal civilian gunfight in the history of the American West. Certainly, it was the most unusual ever recorded.

Elfego’s Early Life

Many legends surround Elfego Baca, but a few facts are certain. On Feb. 27, 1865, he was born in Socorro, New Mexico Territory, to Francisco and Juana María Baca. The first legend has it his mother was playing las Iglesias, the Mexican version of softball, when her son emerged into the world right there on the field. Another legend claims Elfego was kidnapped in early childhood by Indians who immediately returned the toddler to his family after his screaming disturbed the serenity of the abductors’ camp.

A year after Baca’s birth his parents relocated the family to Topeka, Kan. There, surrounded by Anglos, Elfego grew up learning English and how to defend himself—using his wits before resorting to fists or gunplay, but never backing down. 

Then, in early 1872 an unrecorded illness struck the family, claiming the lives of Baca’s mother, two sisters and a brother. Deciding to return to New Mexico Territory, Elfego’s father, Francisco, brought along eldest son Abdenago but left Elfego in the care of an orphanage. Settling in the small town of Belen, in Valencia County some 40 miles north of Socorro, the senior Baca was soon appointed marshal.

In 1880 15-year-old Elfego left the orphanage and made his way to Socorro, some 75 miles south of Albuquerque. There he reunited with brother Abdenago and other members of the Baca clan, later reconnecting with father Francisco. But it was to be a brief reunion for Elfego and his father. That December in the line of duty Marshal Baca shot into the midst of a drunken brawl in Belen, killing a man. Tried for murder the following spring, he was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. Francisco was being held in the Valencia County Jail, in Los Lunas, awaiting transfer to the Kansas State Penitentiary, in Lansing, when he and three other prisoners were “liberated” by Elfego and 15-year-old accomplice identified only as Chavez.

Newspapers reported details of the jailbreak, but only a few people knew of Elfego’s involvement. After escorting his father to El Paso, Texas, where Francisco could slip across the international border should need arise, Elfego returned to New Mexico Territory. Young Baca worked on his uncle’s isolated Socorro cattle ranch and then for a time in the Albuquerque area, where he transported meat by wagon to Santa Fe Railroad workers. But he always returned home to Socorro.

“Not Afraid”

From the 1880s into the ’90s Socorro was besieged by more than 3,000 miners without benefit of much law enforcement. Sheriffs were stretched thin, thus the town ran wide open 24 hours a day. One day in January 1883 liquored-up Texas cowboys staggered out of a Socorro saloon and rode through the Hispanic neighborhoods in a cloud of dust and bullets. County Sheriff Pete Simpson was in pursuit when he happened across Baca. Mounted and armed, Elfego, weeks shy of his 18th birthday, joined the chase at Simpson’s request. In an interview years later Baca claimed to have shot one of the fleeing horsemen from the saddle at better than 300 yards. Newspapers at the time reported that Simpson had made the shot, but Elfego remained cocky about the encounter. When asked if he knew the name of the dead cowboy, he replied flippantly, “He wasn’t able to tell me by the time I caught up with him.”

Though still wild and reckless in many respects, Elfego took a desk job at age 19 as a mercantile clerk for onetime Socorro judge and mayor Juan José Baca (not a relative), where the teen’s ability to speak both Spanish and English served him well. Though hardly as exciting as being a posse member, it beat being punching cows. Still, Elfego harbored ambitions of being a lawman.

In October 1884 Pedro Sarracino, a county sheriff and saloon owner from San Francisco Plaza, aka Frisco (present-day Reserve, N.M.), rode to Socorro to visit storeowner Baca, his brother-in-law. While there Sarracino mentioned to Elfego that several cattle ranches had sprung up in the Frisco area, and that their hands, mostly rowdy Texans, were running roughshod over local Hispanics. The chaos had recently come to a head when cowboys tortured and maimed a local man in Sarracino’s cantina. Outraged and full of teenage braggadocio, an outraged Elfego declared, “I will show the Texans there is at least one Mexican in the county who is not afraid of an American cowboy.” According to a 1924 autobiographical pamphlet, Baca volunteered on the spot to be Sarracino’s deputy. “I told him that if he would take me back to Frisco with him, that I would make myself a self-made deputy.” Elfego later claimed to have made his own badge. With that, the pair headed to Frisco, 110 miles west as the crow flies in far west-central New Mexico Territory. 

The Legendary Fight

For two centuries before Anglo miners and trappers explored the region that today comprises western New Mexico and eastern Arizona the land supported several hundred Hispanic families. Farming, fishing and hunting kept the people well fed. Long before that, of course, the region had supported various sedentary Indian tribes.

In the 1880s cattlemen arrived from Texas and Oklahoma, daily swelling the population of sprawling San Francisco Plaza, a string of three settlements along the namesake river, which by 1884 had become a staging ground for cross-cultural sparring. Anglos sparred with Hispanics who sparred with Indians, and around it went. Adding fuel to the flames were heated arguments between the various cattle outfits—men who “rode for the brand” and took offense when someone from a competing ranch made an offhand comment. On the heels of the influx of rash young men more than a dozen saloons and bordellos sprang up in Middle and Lower Frisco. The valley was rife with tension.

Soon after Sarracino and young Baca arrived in town, Elfego stepped forward to make his first official arrest. On Oct. 29, 1884, inside the popular Milligan’s Whiskey Bar, drunken cowboy Charlie McCarty brandished his pistol at Hispanic patrons, ordering them to dance, then shot off Baca’s hat. Standing his ground, Baca flashed his badge at McCarty, who hailed from the John Bunyan Slaughter ranch, a notoriously rough Socorro County outfit. Somehow Elfego managed to take the man’s gun. 

Cowboys gathered outside were unhappy to hear that this swaggering, self-deputized Hispanic hero had snagged their partner. Liquored up and ready to fight, the Slaughter cowboys leveled their Winchesters at the saloon, cocked at the ready. As angry shouts, curses and threats from the street resounded off the interior walls, Baca barricaded the saloon doors and windows.

The leader of the mob, Slaughter ranch foreman Young Parham, demanded McCarty’s release even while testing the doors and windows with his shoulders. Parham vowed he and his men would take their friend by force if necessary. Elfego hollered back from inside, threatening to shoot if the cowboys weren’t “out of there by the count of three.” The story goes that the ranch hands had begun to crack jokes about Elfego’s race being unable to count, when they heard him call out in a single quick breath, “One-two-three!” Baca and his “deputies”—friends who’d joined him inside—then fired several warning shots through the door.

In the resulting fusillade Parham had his horse shot out from under him, and as it collapsed, the horse crushed and killed him. Another cowboy caught a bullet through his knee. Out of ammunition and focused on caring for Parham, his horse and the wounded man, the ranch hands retreated, swearing vengeance against Baca and his deputies, who remained holed up at Milligan’s. Early the next morning Slaughter’s hands offered a compromise, vowing to leave be those inside the saloon if Baca would allow McCarty to be tried at a neighboring house. Elfego warily agreed and strolled next door with his ward.

At the speedy trial the justice of the peace fined the sobered-up McCarty $5 and ordered his release. By then, however, rumors had spread among the hands on surrounding ranches that Hispanics in Frisco had gone on a murderous rampage, killing and dismembering Anglo citizens. Seeking to mollify the gathering mob, the justice moved to detain Baca for questioning in Parham’s death.

Unwilling to be arrested, mobbed and undoubtedly lynched, Baca slipped out the “courtroom’s” side door and dashed across the plaza to a crude little jacal whose walls of mesquite sticks and dried mud would almost certainly not stop bullets. Evicting owner Geronimo Armijo and family, Elfego settled in for a siege. While much of the populace fled into the overlooking hills to watch the unfolding drama, some 80 vengeance-seeking ranch hands, using the adobe buttresses of a local church as cover, emptied their weapons into the jacal, reloaded and kept firing until its walls were full of holes. 

Incredibly, none of the bullets struck Baca. All attempts to dislodge the teen were unsuccessful. He refused to come out. In frustration Burt Hearne, of the Spur outfit, rode up to the jacal, leapt from his horse and tried to force the door. Immediately, shots from inside struck Hearne in the stomach. He died within moments. The cowboy soon had company. In the long gunplay four of the vigilantes were killed, eight wounded. Late that evening someone lit a stick of dynamite and tossed it at the jacal. The resulting explosion collapsed the roof and one wall. To spectators and Baca’s attackers alike it seemed no one could have survived the blast. But none of the cowboys was willing to investigate in the darkness. They wisely decided to wait and sift the ruins soberly in the light of day. 

As the morning sun peaked over the Mogollon Rim, the hands who’d spent the night sleeping on the cold ground around Baca’s hideout awoke to the aroma of steeping coffee and fresh tortillas—from inside the jacal. After a hearty breakfast the very much alive Baca resumed his watch. One hungry and enraged cowboy charged forward using a cast-iron shield pirated from a cookstove, only to flee and drop the armor after a slug creased his hairline.

At 6 that evening, a day and a half after the first shots were fired, the battle ended when a bona fide Socorro County deputy sheriff, Frank Rose, persuaded Baca to surrender. Before doing so, Elfego insisted on two conditions: to stand trial in Socorro, and to retain his two pistols (one was McCarty’s). The next morning he rode in the back of a buckboard on the return trip to his hometown. Trailing cowboys were warned not to approach.

Back in Frisco curious onlookers pored over the jacal. Inside, they were astonished to find an intact plaster statue of Nuestra Señora Doña Ana. That Baca had survived was also considered a miracle—until his secret was revealed. The jacal’s floor was recessed 18 inches belowground, enough to have screened Elfego from the incoming barrage. 

Yet Baca did seem to lead a charmed life, for an ambush planned for him on the road to Socorro also failed. Two separate groups of would-be assassins each mistakenly thought the other had carried out the attack. Meanwhile, the lawman arrived safely in custody in Socorro.

Charged with murder in the shooting of Hearne, Baca remained in jail until his trial in Albuquerque in May 1885. Among the items entered into evidence was the door of the jacal, bearing nearly 400 bullet holes. That and Sarracino’s testimony convinced the jury Elfego had indeed killed in self-defense. Subsequently tried and acquitted of murder in the death of Parham, Baca was immediately thrust into the status of folk hero to the local Hispanics.

A Colorful Career

Exploiting his notoriety from the Frisco shootout, Baca officially resumed his career as a deputy sheriff in Socorro. He was later elected county sheriff, with the power to secure indictments for the arrest of local lawbreakers. Instead of having his deputies risk life and limb in pursuit of the wanted men, he sent each of the accused a letter: 

“I have a warrant here for your arrest. Please come in by [fill in date] and give yourself up. If you don’t, I’ll know you intend to resist arrest, and I will feel justified in shooting you on sight when I come after you.”

Most fugitives turned themselves in.

Shortly after his acquittal in 1885 Baca married 16-year-old Francisquita Pohmer. Despite alleged dalliances by Elfego, the couple remained together 60 years and raised two sons and four daughters. 

In 1888 Baca was appointed a U.S. marshal and served two years. He then studied law and in 1894 was admitted to the bar. After working for respected jurist Alfred Alexander Freeman’s law firm in Socorro in 1895, Elfego operated his own practice on San Antonio Street in El Paso from 1902 to ’04.

Around 1910 he moved to Albuquerque, where he worked as both a lawyer and private detective. “Dressed in a flowing cape and trailed by a bodyguard, he stalked the downtown streets handing out business cards,” historian Marc Simmons writes. On the front of the card was printed Elfego Baca, Attorney-at-Law, Fees Moderate, on the reverse Private Detective, Divorce Investigations Our Specialty, Discreet Shadowing Done. As if being a private detective wasn’t exciting enough, Baca also worked a stint as a bouncer in a gambling house south of the border in Juárez, Chihuahua.

That period of his life spawned another legend. One day Baca received a telegram from a client in El Paso. “Need you at once,” it read. “Have just been charged with murder.” Attorney Baca supposedly responded with a tongue-in-cheek telegram reading, “Leaving at once with three eyewitnesses.”

When New Mexico achieved statehood in 1912, Baca ran for Congress as a Republican. Though unsuccessful, he remained a valued political figure for his ability to turn out the Hispanic vote. He held several other public offices in succession, including Socorro County clerk, Socorro County school superintendent, mayor of Socorro, and district attorney for Socorro and Sierra counties. “Most reports say he was the best peace officer Socorro ever had,” Leon Metz writes of Baca in his 1996 book The Shooters.

Still more adventures, with revolutionary overtones, awaited Elfego.

Another Escape

In February 1913, after a period of unremitting turmoil amid the Mexican Revolution, President Victoriano Huerta wrested control of the republic, though he continued to face challenges from guerrilla leaders in the northern provinces. Chief among them was Francisco “Pancho” Villa, who controlled much of the state of Chihuahua, bordering New Mexico.

In early January 1914, hotly pursued by Villa’s army, Huerta-allied General José Inés Salazar crossed into Presidio, Texas. Almost at once he was arrested and charged with having violated American neutrality laws. Placed in military custody at Fort Bliss, outside El Paso, the general was later moved to Fort Wingate, near Gallup, New Mexico Territory.

President Huerta in particular wanted Salazar out of jail, and agents of the Mexican government sought the legal services of Baca, whose reputation had spread across the border. Baca traveled to Washington but failed to gain the general’s release. He then engaged in a series of legal shenanigans that garnered his client an additional perjury charge. On November 16 Salazar was transferred to the Bernalillo County Jail, in Baca’s hometown of Albuquerque, to face the charge. Four days later two masked men entered the jail, overpowered and bound the sheriff and sped off in a car with Salazar. He was last spotted in El Paso, headed south.

Word about town had it Huerta’s accomplices had arrived in Albuquerque beforehand and quietly contacted certain influential residents, providing them with substantial funds to arrange Salazar’s freedom. Some suspected Baca had been the ringleader. Yet Elfego had an ironclad alibi for his whereabouts on the night of the escape; he’d been drinking at the crowded Graham Bar in downtown Albuquerque and had even overtly asked a friend for the exact time so he could set his watch.

Regardless, in April 1915 a federal grand jury handed down indictments charging Baca and three other officials with conspiracy in Salazar’s escape. At their December trial all four were acquitted. Elfego’s reputation only soared among Hispanic admirers.

On Feb. 26, 1940, the day before Baca’s 75th birthday, he boasted to The Albuquerque Tribune that of the 30 people he had defended on charges of murder, only one was sent to the penitentiary. In later years Baca worked closely with longtime New Mexico Senator Bronson M. Cutting as a political investigator and wrote a weekly newspaper column in Spanish praising the senator’s work on behalf of local Hispanics. He even switched parties with Cutting in support of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1944, despite poor health, 79-year-old Baca considered running for governor, but that year he failed even to secure the Democratic Party’s nomination for district attorney. 

“I Made ’em Believe it”

For more than six decades Baca remained a lively part of New Mexico’s cultural landscape, relating spirited memories of comely señoritas and political intrigues past. His miraculous deliverance from the 1884 Frisco shootout had earned this man of many facets a reputation as one tough hombre. That reputation followed him throughout his years as a lawman, criminal lawyer, district attorney, private detective, chief bouncer of a Prohibition gambling house and American agent for President Huerta.

On July 13, 1936, Janet Smith of the Federal Writers’ Project, part of the Roosevelt-era Works Progress Administration, conducted an interview with Baca, the notes from which are preserved in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. “I never wanted to kill anybody,” Baca told Smith, “but if a man had it in his mind to kill me, I made it my business to get him first.” Full of self-confidence throughout his life, Baca added, “In those days I was a self-made deputy. I had a badge I made for myself, and if they didn’t believe I was a deputy, they’d better believe it, because I made ’em believe it.” 

As befitting a legend, New Mexico lawman Elfego Baca, who’d been born near the close of the Civil War in 1865, died at age 80 on Aug. 27, 1945, near the close of World War II. He is buried at Sunset Memorial Park in Albuquerque. 

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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For further reading on this topic author Melody Groves recommends Memoirs: Episodes in New Mexico History, 1892–1969, by William A. Keleher; Incredible Elfego Baca: Good Man, Bad Man of the Old West, by Howard Bryan; and The Lost Frontier, by Rod Miller.

Who says living in the past doesn’t pay? Doug Hansen has turned a youthful passion for old-world craftsmanship into an internationally renowned business still rooted on family land in Letcher, S.D. Hansen Wheel & Wagon Shop has restored and built wagons and stagecoaches for museums, theme parks, film and TV productions, collectors, reenactors and people who just plain like to travel by wagon. Working in new and old buildings—the shop’s finishing area is in a former railroad depot—the Hansen team has built wagons and camp gear for such popular productions as Dances With Wolves and 1883, as well as the forthcoming Kevin Costner film Horizons. Hansen has also worked on stagecoaches and wagons for Wells Fargo, Disney, Knotts Berry Farm and Budweiser’s signature Clydesdales. Word has certainly gotten out, as the shop’s history-minded customers include clients in France, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Japan and Taiwan—anywhere people celebrate the heritage of fine craftsmanship. 

What inspired you to work on wagons? 

My family gets a lot of credit, because my dad had a nice shop, my mom had a leather shop, and we had horses. My mother is a saddlemaker. My grandfather was a teamster and had worked in his uncle’s blacksmith shop. I was intrigued with old-world craftsmanship as a kid. A wheel needed restoration, so I undertook that. Pretty soon my mother was buying buggies at antique auctions, and I restored them. All of a sudden my hobby got out of control, and I made it a business. We are building those vehicles I’m passionate about. 

Would you rather restore/rebuild or start from scratch? 

When doing restoration, you’re usually just cleaning up, profiling. But in a replication, you have to build everything, and there are specific hardwoods for different components. A spoke is hickory. A felloe [rim] is white oak. The hub is elm. A reach [bearing shaft] is hickory. All your panel wood is yellow poplar. One of the challenges is finding the stock. In today’s hardwood industry most stock is used for kitchen cabinets and furniture. It’s thinner stock. The wagon industry no longer exists, so the heavy stock and specific species are harder to find. We often find we have to custom saw and custom dry, and it’s a long-drawn-out process.

Building a replica is a lot like being a sculptor. You have to rely on your eye and your hand to recreate that. You are sculpting a horse-drawn vehicle, be it a buckboard or a stagecoach. You are sculpting thousands of components. That historical accuracy of the horse-drawn era is form over function. They have to look good. They have to work. 

What type of vehicle do you most like to restore?

The stagecoach is my passion. It is the most complex. The leather thoroughbraces, the pumpkin-shaped vehicle—it is a complex vehicle of industry and artistry. My aptitude is the mechanical, the engineering, and then the artsy side of it. I can easily comprehend the engineering, and I appreciate the design. Like any historical trade, it takes a certain amount of time to understand. You have to get it right historically. It’s not your design; you are replicating a period.  

How do you define your role?

I’m the visionary. I carry chalk in my pocket, and I draw pictures on the ground or a bench, then work with the actual sculptor, the craftsman. 

How do you find or train employees?

It’s not our equipment that builds wagons—we don’t have cookie cutters. It’s our craftsmen, their dedication, skill and passion. All of them have aptitude. Nobody comes aboard as a wainwright or a wheelwright. We bring them on, train them, immerse them in our world. We work as a team—wheelwright, wainwright, blacksmith, coach maker, painter, trimmer and ornamentor. We take wood, iron, pigments, textiles and leather, and poof! you have a vehicle. One day you roll it out, critique it and say, “What can we do better next time?” We strive to be as proficient as the men back in the 1800s. They had all the knowledge. We’re still uncovering lost knowledge. We will never fully understand the process. 

What historical insights have you gleaned?

There’s a difference between a historian who lives it and one who writes it. I can read about a vehicle, I can look at it, but I don’t understand it as much as when I build it and drive it. 

How do you differ from period Old West craftsmen? 

They were forward engineering to meet a need. We are reverse engineering. What we do is a little bit like archaeology. We need to uncover tidbits of information as well as the obstacles. America was built by the teamsters who had the fortitude, ingenuity and desire to get past obstacles. 

Have any projects left you wondering, Why did I agree to do this one?

Can of worms projects we didn’t mean to put that much money into. We try to figure out in advance, Will this be too complex? Then you open the can of worms. All things are obtainable, but not always obtainable by the budget. 

Do any projects stand out?

I enjoy doing conservation and restoration. We’ve learned so much from vehicles with historical content. Now we understand the design, textiles, leathers, pigments and the engineering specifics of the wood species. There’s so much information when you get a historic vehicle like the last stagecoach we worked on, from Annisquam, Ma. It’s like opening a volume of encyclopedias.

The best museum projects would have to be the Oregon Trail replicas we’ve built. It’s an obscure wagon. There were thousands of them, but the emigrants used them up like old trucks. Those are fun. We’ve built covered wagons for trail interpretive centers across the West. Other vehicles that come to mind are the stagecoaches. We’ve restored Wells Fargo coaches that had original content in them—signatures, dates. We even found an upholsterer’s tool. They’re all fascinating. 

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He was a frontier lawman above reproach and probably made a greater impact on his assigned jurisdiction than any other badge wearer west of the Mississippi. Deputy U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves was part Superman, part Sherlock Holmes and part Lone Ranger. But he was real, and he was black.

The larger-than-life African-American marshal worked in the most dangerous area for federal peace officers, Oklahoma and Indian territories, for 32 years. Recent research shows that before the two territories merged into the state of Oklahoma in 1907, at least 114 deputy U.S. marshals died on duty there. It was no picnic for members of the Indian police or local law enforcement, either, but the challenges and hardships were usually greatest for the deputy marshals.

The majority of federal lawmen were killed in the Cherokee and Creek nations of Indian Territory, within a 50-mile radius of Muskogee, in the Creek Nation. When recognizing the wild towns of the Wild West, Muskogee must be mentioned along with Tombstone, Arizona Territory; Las Vegas, New Mexico Territory; Dodge City, Kan.; and El Paso, Texas.

Born a slave near Van Buren, Ark., in July 1838, young Bass moved with his owner to north Texas in the 1840s. His owner, George R. Reeves, was a farmer, tax collector and sheriff before the Civil War. During the war, Colonel Reeves organized the 11th Cavalry Regiment for Grayson County, Texas. Bass Reeves said in a 1901 interview that he had been George’s body servant but that they had parted company (not on good terms, according to family history) during the war. Supposedly, Bass and George argued during a card game, and Bass knocked his master out cold. In Texas, a slave could be killed for such an act, so Bass headed for Indian Territory and found refuge with the Creek and Seminole Indians, learning their customs and language. (After the war, George Reeves would rise to become speaker of the House of Representatives in Texas before dying from a rabid dog’s bite on September 5, 1882.)

Exactly what Bass Reeves did during the Civil War after he left his master remains uncertain. One uncorroborated claim says that Reeves served in the U.S. Army as a sergeant during the conflict. It’s possible he could have been with one of the guerrilla Union Indian bands in the territory, such as the Cherokee Pins. He might also have served with the Union’s First Indian Home Guard Regiment, composed mostly of Seminoles and Creeks, under an Indian name. The Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw and Seminole), who earlier had been relocated from the Southeast to Indian Territory, fought on both sides during the conflict. Afterward, the western portion of the territory was taken away from them and set aside as reservations for Plains Indian tribes (Comanche, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Apache and Kiowa) who were subdued by the U.S. military.

By the early 1870s, Bass and his family (wife, Jennie, and four children; eventually there would be 11 children) were living in Arkansas. Although other blacks lived in the countryside near Van Buren, Reeves built a substantial home for his family right in the town proper on the riverfront. Several oral stories say that Reeves served as a scout and guide for federal lawmen going into Indian Territory in search of outlaws. A better employment opportunity came in 1875. That March, Judge Isaac C. Parker took over the Fort Smith federal court in Arkansas, which had jurisdiction over all Indian Territory and western Arkansas, and he promptly ordered his marshal to hire 200 deputies. At that time, the territory consisted of all the land that would become the state of Oklahoma except for the panhandle. This was the largest federal court, in terms of area, in U.S. history, and most likely there were never more than 70 deputies covering the vast area at any one time. Bass Reeves was one of the deputies hired that year. He was skilled with weapons, could speak several Indian languages and apparently knew the lay of the land. The federal police had jurisdiction over whites or blacks that were not citizens of the respective tribes in Indian Territory. The Indians had their own police and courts for their citizens. Noncitizens who committed crimes against the Indians would have to be arrested by deputy U.S. marshals and their cases heard in federal court.

Bass Reeves has been called the first commissioned African-American deputy U.S. marshal west of the Mississippi River, but this may not be true. A story in the “Indian Pioneer Papers” at the Oklahoma State History Museum in Oklahoma City tells of a posse led by one “Negro” Smith from Fort Smith in 1867. Smith was sent to catch a gang of outlaws who had robbed a stagecoach and killed the driver near Atoka, in the Choctaw Nation. The Cherokee Advocate reported on October 14, 1871, that a Cherokee Indian named Ross had killed a black deputy U.S. marshal on the banks of the Arkansas River opposite Fort Smith. Reeves, though, was undoubtedly one of the first, and he certainly became the most famous black deputy to work the Indian nations before statehood.

In the late 1870s, despite being a commissioned deputy U.S. marshal, Reeves served as a posseman and went into Indian Territory with more experienced lawmen, including Deputy U.S. Marshals Robert J. Topping and Jacob T. Ayers. Later, Reeves and his good friend Deputy U.S. Marshal John H. Mershon teamed up on occasion. Federal law mandated that deputies take at least one posseman whenever they went into the field. On extended trips into the territory, deputy marshals often brought two or more possemen, along with a guard and a cook. One or two supply wagons (sometimes referred to as “tumbleweed wagons”) would serve as headquarters on the prairie while the lawmen rounded up desperadoes. The Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad tracks in the territory were known as the “deadline.” Deputies couldn’t arrest anyone east of the tracks until they were on their way back to Fort Smith. The lawmen typically traveled west to Fort Reno and Anadarko, south to Fort Sill and then back to Fort Smith. This trip took in about 400 miles and would take one to two months depending on high water.

Reeves made catching criminals while in disguise part of his modus operandi. He did this throughout his years while working for the federal courts at Fort Smith, Ark., and Paris, Texas. Sometimes he would appear as a drifter, other times as a cowboy, preacher or farmer. For example, he once got a tip that some dangerous outlaws were holed up in a log cabin, so he dressed in farmer overalls and intentionally got his ramshackle wagon stuck on a nearby tree stump. When the four outlaws came out to help him get unstuck, he got the drop on them and brought them to justice.

In disguise or not, it was a dangerous business. The closest he came to losing his life, he said in a 1906 newspaper interview, came sometime in 1884 while riding the Seminole whiskey trail in search of four men, two white and two black, for whom he had warrants. His pursuit was interrupted by three brothers named Brunter—who had been accused of horse stealing, robbery and several unsolved murders in Indian Territory.

The Brunters got the drop on Reeves. With their guns pointed at the lawman, they ordered him to dismount and keep his hands away from his Colt revolver. Reeves played it cool, showing the brothers warrants for their arrest and asking them what day of the month it was, so that he could make a record for the government. The outlaws thought the lawman must be out of his mind. They told Reeves, “You are just ready to turn in now,” but they were laughing too hard and relaxed their guard. Reeves whipped out his Colt and killed two of the brothers as quick as lightning. While he was in the act of shooting those two, he grabbed the gun barrel of the third outlaw, who could only manage three harmless shots. Reeves hit the third Brunter in the head with his revolver, killing him. There would be no fees to collect on the three dead men, but there were now three fewer desperadoes infesting Indian Territory. Also in 1884, a benchmark year in Reeves’ long career, Bass and the noted Choctaw lawman Charles LeFlore arrested Texas horse thief Robert Landers right in Fort Smith. Reeves’ most celebrated gunfight occurred that same year. Jim Webb, the foreman of the huge Washington-McLish Ranch in the Chickasaw Nation, was his foe. A black preacher who owned a small farm adjacent to the ranch had let a fire get out of control, and it spread onto ranch land. Webb had scolded the preacher, but that didn’t satisfy his anger. He had then shot him to death. Webb was one tough hombre who had reportedly killed 11 men while living in the Brazos River region in Texas. Reeves was able to arrest Webb without incident but was forced to go after him again when the foreman jumped his bond.

In June 1884, Reeves located Webb at Bywaters Store at the foothills of the Arbuckle Mountains. Webb refused to surrender this time, and the two men had a running gunfight. After nearly being shot himself, Reeves got down from his horse, raised his Winchester and shot Webb twice from a distance of about a quarter-mile. Several cowboys and the owner of the store witnessed this gunfight. Heroics like that had caused the Muskogee Indian Journal to refer to Reeves as one of the best deputy U.S. marshals in Indian Territory. At that time, after Reconstruction, it was rare to find black federal policemen anywhere in the country except Indian Territory. Reeves and the other black deputies there would blaze a trail of justice and equality for all citizens of that federal protectorate. During the territorial era, at least 50 black deputy U.S. marshals served in Indian Territory.

Reeves stood out in most any gathering of marshals, white or black, and not just because he stood 6-foot-2 and weighed 180 pounds. He had a reputation for being able to whip any two men with his bare hands and manipulate six-shooters and rifles equally well with either hand. His most trusted weapon was a Winchester rifle, but he was also known to carry as many as three revolvers, two butt forward at his belt for easy access. Territorial newspapers reported that during his career he killed 14 desperadoes—but it could have been twice that number. He brought in a great many men alive, too, including outlaws with bounties on their heads. As a man hunter, he had few equals. On one occasion he hauled in 17 horse thieves in “Comanche country” near Fort Sill. Texas rustlers often ventured into Indian Territory to steal ponies from the Indian residents. Not that Bass Reeves was perfect. Nobody could be a lawman that long without chalking up a blemish or two on his record. On one of his 1884 trips into the Chickasaw Nation, Reeves shot and killed his black cook, William Leech. On April 8, while Reeves and his posse were camped near the Canadian River, he uttered a few choice words about Leech’s cooking, and Leech responded in kind. The possemen assumed the banter was all in fun, since Reeves and Leech had seemingly gotten along in the past. But this time things apparently got out of hand. Leech, according to one popular account, poured some hot grease down the throat of a puppy that Reeves had in camp, and the deputy marshal proceeded to shoot down the cook. Then again it might not have happened that way at all, and the dog might have belonged to Leech. In any case, nothing came of the shooting for a while.

The next year, 1885, was considerably less eventful. But in September ’85, Bass Reeves did swear out a warrant for the arrest of the infamous female outlaw Belle Starr, as well as Fayette Barnett, for horse stealing. Reeves and Belle Starr were apparently on friendly terms. Many times in dealing with people he knew, Reeves would inform them that they were wanted in Fort Smith and it might be better if they would turn themselves in so he wouldn’t have to haul them around the countryside. Although it is not known for sure that he made this suggestion to Mrs. Starr, she did soon turn herself in at Fort Smith—the only time on record that she did so—and reportedly said that she “did not propose to be dragged around by some federal deputy.”

In January 1886, two years after shooting his cook, Reeves was indicted for first-degree murder, arrested by Deputy U.S. Marshal G.J.B. Frair and held in the Fort Smith federal jail. It took six months before Reeves could make bond. On May 21, President Grover Cleveland appointed a new U.S marshal, John Carroll—the first former Confederate veteran that Reeves would serve under at Fort Smith. Whether Carroll had anything to do with the proceedings against Reeves is not known. The trial was finally held in October 1887. Eleven witnesses were called for the prosecution, while Reeves and his excellent attorneys requested 10 witnesses for the defense. Reeves testified that he had argued with Leech while in camp but that nothing had come of it. That same evening, Reeves said, a cartridge caught in his Winchester rifle and while trying to dis lodge the bullet, the gun accidentally went off. The bullet, the defendant continued, struck Leech in the neck, and though Reeves sent for a doctor, the cook expired before medical help could arrive. Reeves was acquitted of malicious murder, but because the murder trial had depleted his substantial savings, he had to sell his home in Van Buren and move his family to a house on the outskirts of Fort Smith.

Reeves resumed his productive ways in the field after this interlude, once again bringing in desperadoes and villains by the dozen. In the spring of 1889, Jacob Yoes, a Union Army veteran, was appointed U.S. marshal at Fort Smith. Late that year, Yoes sent Reeves after a gang of killers, and on December 30, Reeves sent a note to the marshal saying, “Have got the three men who killed Deputy Marshal [Joseph] Lundy [on June 14, 1889].” His three prisoners were Seminole Indians— Nocus Harjo, One Prince and Bill Wolf. In April 1890, Reeves captured the notorious Seminole Tosa-lo-nah (alias Greenleaf), who had murdered and robbed three white men and four Indians. Greenleaf had been on the run from the law for 18 years, and this was the first time he was arrested.

In November 1890, Reeves went after an even more famous Indian Territory outlaw, the Cherokee Ned Christie, who was accused of killing Deputy U.S. Marshal Dan Maples in May 1887. Christie had maintained his innocence but refused to come to the white man’s court, for he felt no justice would be served. Reeves and his posse attacked Ned’s hideout in the Cherokee hills, known locally as Ned’s Fort Mountain. Reeves was able to burn down the fortified cabin. At first, he believed Christie was trapped inside, but he later found out that the renegade had escaped. Christie swore vengeance on Reeves but failed to make good on the threat before a large federal posse killed Christie at Fort Mountain on November 2, 1892.

The first white and black settlers had been allowed onto Indian lands in 1889, when Oklahoma Territory, just west of Indian Territory, was opened. In a 1930s interview, Harve Lovelday, an early white settler in Pottawattomie County, described the scene in the territories:

In Old Oklahoma the West was West when the six-shooters worked out in the gambling halls and in the saloons of Asher, Avoca, Wanette, Earlsboro, Violet Springs, Corner, and Keokuk Falls about the time of 1889 and 1890….These small Western towns were inhabited by Negroes, whites, Indians, half-bloods, gamblers, bootleggers, killers and any kind of an outcast….

Bass Reeves, a coal-black Negro, was a U.S. Deputy Marshal during one time and he was the most feared U.S. marshal that was ever heard in that country. To any man or any criminal what was subject to arrest he did his full duty according to law. He brought men before the court to be tried fairly but many times he never brought in all the criminals but would kill some of them. He didn’t want to spend so much time in chasing down the man who resisted arrest so would shoot him down in his tracks.

The new Oklahoma Territory towns were different from the Indian Territory towns in that saloons were legal in the former. Profiteers—principally white men and women—could make a killing by buying liquor in Oklahoma Territory and bringing it into Indian Territory, as long as the deputy U.S. marshals didn’t catch them. The federal court for Oklahoma Territory was in Guthrie. Reeves, like many other deputy U.S. marshals, became cross-deputized so that he could work in both territories.

The worst saloon town in Oklahoma Territory was said to be the Corner, just across the boundary with the Seminole and Chickasaw nations. The term “bootlegging” supposedly came from the drovers, cowboys and ranchers who would put a flat bottle of whiskey in their boots and smuggle the contraband into Indian Territory for profit. The term “last chance” was coined here, because these border saloon towns offered the last chance to get legal whiskey before a traveler crossed into the dry Indian nations. On at least one occasion, Reeves reportedly killed a gunman in a Corner saloon who called him out for a gunfight.

In late June 1891, Reeves and his posse rode into Fort Smith with eight prisoners (five wanted for murder) from the Indian nations. The captured outlaws included William Wright, a black man; Wiley Bear and John Simmer, Indians; and William McDaniel and Ben Card, white men. McDaniel and Card had been arrested for allegedly killing John Irvin, a black man, but Reeves apparently didn’t have enough solid evidence to indict the pair. The Fort Smith Weekly Elevator attacked Reeves for chaining up the two men and dragging them around Creek country for nearly a month. Most likely, Reeves was reprimanded by Marshal Yoes, but there is no record of such action.

Reeves left Fort Smith around 1893 and transferred to the federal court at Paris, Texas. This court had jurisdiction over much of the Chickasaw and Choctaw nations in the 1890s. Reeves was stationed at Calvin, Choctaw Nation, and would take many of his prisoners to Pauls Valley, Chickasaw Nation, where a federal commissioner was stationed and there was a jail. Hearings would be held at Pauls Valley, and if necessary, criminals were transferred to the Texas court for trial. By the late 1890s, three federal courts were located in Indian Territory to hear major and minor cases—the Southern District at Ardmore, Central District at McAlester and Northern District at Muskogee. Federal authorities transferred Reeves to the Northern District, where he was first stationed at tiny Wetumka in the Creek Nation. By 1898 he was living in Muskogee, where he would stay until statehood in 1907.

Reeves escaped many assassination attempts during his career, one of the last occurring on the evening of November 14, 1906, at Wybark, Creek Nation. While riding in his buggy looking to serve warrants, he was fired upon under a railroad trestle by unknown parties. He returned fire, but nobody was hit. By that time, Reeves was focusing on arresting black and Indian felons, though he would still arrest white outlaws if the occasion called for it.

The last major gunfight that Reeves took part in erupted in Muskogee on March 26, 1907. A large group of black anarchists calling themselves the United Socialist Club had taken over a two-story house and declared that they could claim any property in town. Two city constables, John Colfield and Guy Fisher, were sent with eviction papers, only to be met at the door of the house by gunfire. Fisher was wounded, but escaped; Colfield was severely wounded and couldn’t move from where he lay. The U.S. marshal’s office was alerted, and Chief Deputy U.S. Marshal Bud Ledbetter, along with a black deputy U.S. marshal named Paul Smith and others, arrived on the scene. An intense gunfight followed. Ledbetter killed two of the offenders, and Smith saved Ledbetter’s life by killing one of the radicals who had Ledbetter pinned down. Reeves arrived late. After noting where most of the gunfire was coming from, he plugged an anarchist who was shooting down on the lawmen from an upstairs window. The lawmen killed two more of the group before the remaining seven anarchists surrendered. Constables Colfield and Fisher recovered from their wounds, and Ledbetter called Reeves “one of the bravest men this country has ever known.”

Even before that shootout, on March 8, 1907, the Oklahoma City Weekly Times-Journal ran a story headlined “He has Killed Fourteen Men: A Fearless Negro Deputy of the Indian Territory.” Two days later, on March 10, The Washington Post reprinted that lengthy article. It would be the most national exposure Bass Reeves received during his lifetime. And if accurate, it means that the black anarchist he killed later that month would have been No. 15.

When Oklahoma became a state on November 16, 1907, the federal office was downsized, and many of the lawmen found other jobs. Bass Reeves, now 68, took a job with the Muskogee police department, walking a downtown beat. Old-timers reported that Reeves would walk with a sidekick who carried a satchel full of pistols and that there was never a crime on his beat. Reeves would complete 32 years of service as a law officer without ever being reported wounded. He died at home of Bright’s disease on January 12, 1910, at age 71, and was buried somewhere in Muskogee. The exact location is not known today; it was probably either in the Old Agency cemetery or in a small black cemetery west of town on Fern Mountain Road. Reeves’ long service and remarkable dedication to duty could match any lawman of his time, and his six-shooter had been, as the two newspapers reported in March 1907, “a potent element in bringing two territories out of the reign of the outlaw, the horsethief and bootlegger, to a great common wealth.”

Art T. Burton, a native of Oklahoma, is a history professor at South Suburban College in South Holland, Ill. His 2006 book Black Gun, Silver Star: The Life and Legend of Frontier Marshal Bass Reeves is recommended for further reading along with his 1991 book Black, Red, and Deadly: Black and Indian Gunfighters of the Indian Territories. Originally published in the February 2007 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here.