The killing of Bill Mulvey sent a message, or perhaps a known gunfighter with a badge was message enough, because a reporter visiting Hays City wrote back to readers of The Topeka Commonwealth that the city “under the guardian care of Wild Bill Hickok is quiet and doing well.”
Apparently, Hickok believed that dressing well would enhance his peacekeeping efforts. He patrolled the streets not only well armed, with a sawed-off shotgun complementing his Colt six-shooters, but also attired as fine as any Hays City leading citizen. Another reporter, this one having been dispatched by The St. Louis Republican, included in his article a description of Hickok that had not changed from ones written the last few years (“In physique he is as perfect a specimen of manhood as ever walked in moccasins”). But he added a few details that reflected the impression the marshal made on his new jurisdiction: “Bill is a dandy at all times in attire—a regular frontier dude.… There is nothing in his appearance to betoken the dead shot and frequent man-killer, except his tread. He walks like a tiger and, aroused, he is as ferocious and pitiless as one.”
Because trouble could occur at any moment, during his lawman stint in Hays City, Hickok sometimes went on patrol on horseback, the better to see his surroundings from a higher vantage point. When on foot, adhering to his previous practice, he strolled in the middle of the street rather than on the wooden sidewalks. If someone was foolish or ambitious enough to jump him, Hickok wanted to see him coming.
The St. Louis scribe informed his readers about such a confrontation that demonstrated that even with precautions, the sheriff’s life hung on a slender thread. Hickok was patrolling an unsavory section of the city—such sections at that time were in the majority—when a short man known as Sullivan suddenly appeared in the street brandishing a pistol. For some reason, he aimed to harm Hickok. “I’ve got you. Hold up your hands!” Sullivan shouted. “I’m going to kill you.”
There may have been some newspaperman himself in Sullivan because the diminutive gunman began to compose out loud the type of article he expected would be published about the death of Wild Bill. Onlookers were gathering, and Sullivan regaled them with increasingly colorful adjectives. His fatal mistake was not only forgetting who his intended victim was but forgetting him altogether. Hickok stood still, his eyes gazing at the loquacious gunman, but his hand slowly crept toward his right holster. Sullivan was between one syllable and the next when he died.
As Hickok put his pistol away, he remarked to the crowd, “He talked his life away.”
As if keeping the peace in Hays City weren’t handful enough, Hickok doubled as a sort of one-man employment agency. There are enough tales of him helping young men find jobs that at least a few must be true. One of them came from Harry Young, who many years later wrote about his first encounter with Hickok, in Hays City.1 He had come to town with $40 in his pockets. By the end of a night’s entertainments, Young was left with $1.50.
Rather morosely, he was swaying on the sidewalk when he felt a tap on the shoulder. “I turned and found myself face-to-face with the finest-looking man I have ever seen or expect to see,” Young recalled. He noted the “long auburn hair and clear blue eyes—eyes that showed kindness and friendship to all except the evil-doer, to whom they meant the reverse.”
In answer to the lawman’s question, Young explained that he had just frittered away his pay from a construction job, and now being pretty much broke, he hoped to find work in Hays City. Hickok told him there were jobs hauling freight for men who could drive a six-mule team and could tie “a government ham-string.” Hickok taught him this knot and told him to meet him the next morning. Young did, and the two rode out to Fort Hays.
According to Young’s recollection: “There we met the corral boss, and Wild Bill asked him to put me to work.” After demonstrating that he could tie the ham-string knot and passing a few other rudimentary tests, Young was hired. He worked the job for six months to get back on his feet and “saw a great deal of Wild Bill.” After Hickok moved on from Hays City, he and Young would meet each other once more, in Deadwood.
Sometime during his service as a lawman in Hays City, Hickok met a man who would later play a role in his “career” as a stage actor. John Omohundro was born in July 1846 in Palmyra, Virginia. He was just seventeen when he enlisted in the Confederate army, and until the war ended, he served in the Fifth Cavalry Corps commanded by J. E. B. Stuart. After the surrender, rather than return to his family in Virginia, Omohundro set off for Texas, where he spent three years as a cowboy in a reviving cattle industry. During one drive into Tennessee, he acquired the nickname “Texas Jack.”
Late in the summer of 1869, Omohundro was at Fort Hays, where he met California Joe, who in turn introduced him to Wild Bill Hickok. Moses Embree “California Joe” Milner was a veteran plainsman and scout who had crossed paths with Hickok several times. When George Armstrong Custer had been assigned to the West after the Civil War, Milner looked like a good candidate to lead a new unit of civilian scouts. “He was a man about 40 years of age, maybe older, over 6 feet in height and possessing a well-proportioned frame,” the lieutenant colonel wrote in My Life on the Plains. “His head was covered with a luxuriant crop of long, almost black hair, strongly inclined to curl and so long as to fall carelessly over his shoulders. His face, at least so much of it as was not concealed by the long, waving brown beard and mustache, was full of intelligence and pleasant to look upon. His eye was undoubtedly handsome, black and lustrous with an expression of kindness and mildness combined.”
Milner had been born in Kentucky in 1829 to parents who had emigrated from England. At fourteen, he ran away from home and in St. Louis joined a hunting and trapping expedition. He served with Brigadier General Stephen Kearny in the war with Mexico and returned to marry a thirteen-year-old, and the couple moved to California. Milner toiled as a prospector. When gold did not appear in his pan, he and his wife, Nancy, bought a ranch in Oregon and raised four children. He was known as a man of decisive action: when one of his horses was stolen, Milner tracked the thief down, shot him in the head, and left him on the side of a road with a note pinned to his coat warning other thieves the same fate awaited them.
In the 1860s, he was on the move a lot because of his abilities as a scout and a handler of mules. In a saloon in Virginia City, Montana, when miners asked him where he was from, Milner responded, “I’m from California, where most of the gold is, and my name is Joe. That’s enough for you to know.” He was christened California Joe. He scouted for Custer and the Seventh Cavalry for close to a decade. In the 1941 film They Died with Their Boots On, California Joe is portrayed by the character actor Charley Grapewin and is shown dying next to Errol Flynn’s Custer during the Battle of Little Bighorn. However, Milner was not on that expedition; he was prospecting in the Black Hills.
After meeting up in Hays City that fall of 1869, Wild Bill, California Joe, and Texas Jack enjoyed each other’s company in the saloons, with the young Omohundro being an eager audience for the plainsmen’s tales of adventure on the prairie. When Texas Jack moved on sometime that autumn, he encountered Buffalo Bill. Cody was scouting for the Fifth U.S. Cavalry stationed at Fort McPherson in Nebraska. He invited Texas Jack to sign on, and the two became good friends. In their future was a production titled Scouts of the Plains, which would, improbably, feature Hickok as a member of the cast.
When that time came, it could be said that Hickok had some experience as a showman because, as he had done in previous stops, he enjoyed putting on shooting exhibitions. Most likely, there was a good public relations angle for such demonstrations—bad guys or even just rowdy cowboys had better think twice about carrying a weapon in town and risk being confronted by the marshal. But it also seems Hickok had fun awing onlookers.
“I saw him draw his pistol in front of the old depot, throw it over his first finger, cocking it with his thumb as it came around and keep a tomato can jumping for a whole block down to Riley’s saloon on the next corner,” remembered Joe Hutt, a former buffalo hunter, about Hickok. “He was not a drunken, quarrelsome man-killer, but picturesque and a fine shot. It was not always the blustering bullies that were the bravest men in a western town.”
Time for Jim Curry to reappear in these pages. Inevitably, as a patrolling peace officer, Hickok would come up against the dangerous desperado. Perhaps trying to spurn his violent past, by the fall of 1869, Curry was a fairly successful saloonkeeper. However, he still believed the law did not concern him. The marshal did not share that belief. In an article published in the June 15, 1913, edition of The Kansas City Star, C. J. Bascom, a young resident of Hays City forty-four years earlier, recalled that Hickok “was ruling the town with an iron hand. It was something unusual and unexpected. They did not know just what to think nor how long this rule would last.” Bascom himself witnessed what was almost the end.
Curry, apparently, was outgoing and friendly when he was of a mind to be. On a lovely late-summer day when Bascom entered Curry’s establishment, the proprietor suggested they take a walk. When they came to a saloon owned by Tommy Drum, they decided to go in for lunch. When Curry spotted Hickok playing cards at a table at the back of the saloon, a switch was thrown. Remembering or imagining all kinds of slights, Curry snuck up behind Hickok, then pointed the barrel of his cocked pistol at his head. “Now, you son of a gun,” Curry whispered, “I’ve got you.”
Enhancing his reputation of being fearless, Hickok remained still for several seconds, then, as if remarking on the weather, he said, “Jim, you would not murder a man without giving him a show.”
“I’ll give you the same show you would give me,” Curry hissed, adding, “you long-haired tough.” (We can assume the newspaper version of this event was sanitized for general consumption.)
Hickok considered this unpleasant option, then suggested, “Jim, let us settle this feud. How would a bottle of champagne all around do?”
There was another shift in Curry’s brain because his reaction was to burst out laughing, and nervous onlookers followed suit. Drum began popping open pint bottles of bubbly. Hickok and Curry shook hands and poured a couple of glasses each down the hatch.
Unfortunately, the peaceful outcome to the confrontation with Jim Curry did not put an end to the killing in Hays City. The next man to take on Hickok was Samuel Strawhun, and this showdown had a much different ending.
Only twenty-four in September 1869, Strawhun already had a reputation as a man-killer, though his actual occupation was cowboy. In Hays City, he’d already caused considerable trouble that summer, particularly his connection to the shooting death of the deputy U.S. marshal Joe Weiss. Yet Strawhun had been one of the men who had petitioned Governor Harvey to appoint a new sheriff of Ellis County. Still, his behavior was such that the Vigilance Committee had ordered him to leave. His response was to confront Alonzo Webster once again and this time to pistol-whip him, and no one had done anything about it. However, when Hickok was hired as marshal, Strawhun left town. There was a collective sigh of relief, and it was presumed he would not return to Hays City as long as Wild Bill patrolled its dusty streets.
Thus, there was fear and disappointment when on the twenty-sixth of September, Strawhun was back and had brought eighteen cowboy colleagues with him. They didn’t care who was in charge; it was simply time to raise hell. They got off their horses and parked themselves in John Bitter’s Leavenworth Beer Saloon, determined to cause as much of a ruckus as they could while drinking it dry. Strawhun was heard to declare, “I’m going to kill someone tonight just for luck.”
As The Leavenworth Times and Conservative would report, “It appears that Stranghan [sic] and a number of his companions being ‘wolfing’ all night, wished to conclude by cleaning out a beer saloon and breaking things generally. ‘Wild Bill’ was called upon to quiet them.”
It was close to 1 A.M. on the twenty-seventh as Hickok approached the saloon. Glasses were flying out into the street, tossed by Strawhun and his cowboy pals. There was quite a commotion inside the saloon; as The Leavenworth Daily Commercial reported in its October 3 edition, “The noise was fearful, all the men crying at the top of their voices, beer! Beer! And using the most obscene language.”
Hickok picked up several of the glasses that had not broken and carried them inside. Sizing up the situation, he said, “Boys, you hadn’t ought to treat a poor man in this way.” When Strawhun vowed to take the glasses from Hickok and throw them out into the street again, the marshal replied, “Do, and they will carry you out.”
Strawhun made a sudden move, either for a glass or for his gun. In any event, suddenly blood gushed from his neck, spewing from the hole Hickok’s bullet had left. He would be buried later that day in the city’s cemetery. Though severely outnumbered, Hickok, with both pistols now out, went unchallenged as the crowd inside the saloon backed down.
A coroner’s inquest was held at nine o’clock that morning. There was some contradictory testimony, probably owing to many of the witnesses having been inebriated when the shooting occurred. Hickok’s terse defense was he had “tried to restore order.” The jury agreed, declaring the death of Samuel Strawhun justifiable homicide. The Leavenworth Daily Commercial concluded its account: “Too much credit cannot be given to Wild Bill for his endeavor to rid this town of such dangerous characters as this Stranhan [sic] was.”
The news of such quick and rough justice spread fast, and during the following weeks, there was no more gunplay in the county. Still, Hickok had to be constantly on the alert for an ambush. For those who disapproved of Hays City becoming less rowdy and lawless, the easiest solution would be to get rid of the marshal. The eyesight that made him such a good marksman was in full use as he strode down the middle of the street. Few were allowed to approach him, especially from behind. If it sounded like activities in a saloon were getting out of hand, Wild Bill Hickok pushed through the doors, then, with his back to the bar, calmly said what he wanted to say. With his hands poised near the handles of his Colts, he passed back through the crowd to the street.
There was to be an election in November 1869. One would think, given his mostly successful efforts at bringing some law and order to Hays City, that Hickok would be more officially elected marshal of Hays City or sheriff of Ellis County or possibly both. The people who hired him appeared to approve of his very direct methods. In his book Buffalo Land, published just four years later, William Webb, one of the founders of the city, described Hickok as “very quiet and gentlemanly, and not at all the reckless fellow we had supposed. His form won our admiration—the shoulders of a Hercules with the waist of a girl.”
It is interesting to note that some people who encountered Hickok saw almost a feminine quality to him. Part of this had to do with his physique and perhaps also because of his dress and an unusual practice at that time on the frontier. As Joseph Rosa explained, “Hickok’s passion for taking a bath every day, at first frowned upon by the wild men of Hays, soon started a tradition, and many of them made regular trips to the bathhouse.” (In more ways than one, Wild Bill cleaned up the city.) When he dressed for the day, the lawman left buckskins behind and stepped out wearing a Prince Albert coat.
His opponent on Election Day would be Rattlesnake Pete Lanahan. Hickok may have first made his acquaintance during the Civil War. Lanahan spent those years working in the quartermaster’s department at Fort Hays and stayed on afterward as the town was being established. In February 1868, during an early effort at peacekeeping in Hays City, town fathers hired Lanahan as a city policeman. This lasted only a few months patrolling what The Junction City Weekly Union dubbed the “Sodom of the Plains”; then Lanahan sought the safety of the fort, returning to work there. When Hickok was placed in control in August 1869, one of his first acts was to appoint Lanahan as a deputy.
He had proven to be a good lawman. And Lanahan, running on the Democratic line, proved to be a good candidate, too. Hickok, listed as Independent, lost the election 114–89. His defeat could be attributed to more citizens fearing Hickok than liking him, or he was simply a victim of numbers, as most voters in Ellis County were registered Democrats.
Especially since his trusted deputy had won, Hickok must not have had any hard feelings about losing yet another election, because instead of mounting up and moving on after the last vote was counted, he agreed to serve through the transition to Lanahan’s taking office. For Lanahan’s sake, too bad Hickok didn’t stay on longer. Lanahan was not the feared shootist Wild Bill had been, and while that was fine with solid citizens, the rowdier element saw opportunities. Lanahan found it harder and harder to keep the peace, and one night in July 1871, he lost his job … permanently.
It was a setup. Several men began fighting in a Tenth Street saloon. When Lanahan arrived to break up the brawl, he was greeted with two bullets in the chest. Lanahan lingered for a couple of days in his room at the courthouse building, then died. One of the men who fired at him was Charles Harris, the saloon’s bartender. Rattlesnake Pete had some satisfaction that he had managed to get off one shot, striking Harris in the head and killing him.
Back before Lanahan’s tenure began, Hickok had to think December 1869 would be quiet, even in Hays City. He had not counted on a fighter named Patterson and his boxing ring. He was as professional as a boxer could be in the late 1860s and had come to introduce what would later be called the “sweet science” to the frontier. He set up a ring in Hays City and began to demonstrate the art of pugilism and its advantages over barroom brawling. When spectators were not impressed enough to pay real money to witness these demonstrations, Patterson decided he had to raise his profile. He had noticed the slender, long-haired marshal and figured without his guns he would be an easy conquest.
He approached Hickok in Drum’s saloon and challenged him to a fight. The marshal was puzzled, with his adversary not wearing any weapons. Patterson explained, “I’m told you’re the toughest man on the frontier. I’ll prove you’re not, with my bare hands.”
Grinning, Hickok sized up the larger man, then invited him to step outside. Those in the saloon followed them out and were immediately joined by other onlookers. Patterson went into something of a crouch, what passed then as a boxer’s stance. (It would not be until 1889 that the Marquess of Queensberry Rules were used in the United States.) When Patterson began to advance, Hickok assumed the fight had begun. It lasted less than five minutes and was deemed over when buckets of water from the nearest horse trough were splashed onto Patterson to revive him. He was soon plying his brand of pugilism elsewhere on the frontier.
The Topeka House was a hotel in the capital of Kansas, and Hickok went there when he left Hays City. With a new decade about to begin, the thirty-two-year-old man-killer and ex-marshal had to ponder what would be the next chapter in his life. He could not have known that his experience in Hays City of being a lawman in a lawless town had been a sort of a dress rehearsal for being a lawman in Abilene.