When the construction of Drovers Cottage was completed in 1868, it represented Abilene’s potential as a cow town. That potential was fulfilled, but at a cost. Abilene also came to represent the lawlessness and violence of the Kansas cow towns that put prosperity above peacekeeping. When the latter became a priority for the citizenry, the way was paved for two lawmen to take over a daunting responsibility. One of them was Wild Bill Hickok.
As mentioned previously, Timothy Hersey deserves much credit for the founding of Abilene, but it was Joseph McCoy who set it on the road to being a boomtown. In the fall of 1867, he and his two older brothers arrived in what was then a rather sleepy settlement. Though still young men, they had experience in the cattle trade, running their own business in Springfield, Illinois. Joseph McCoy, in particular, was a visionary. He added together the facts that there were tens of thousands of cattle in Texas and the Kansas Pacific Railway was working its way west, and the sum was somewhere in Kansas there was a place that would generate huge profits.
Earlier that year, McCoy had visited the offices of Kansas Pacific in St. Louis. He tried to persuade executives there to relocate the company’s stockyards from Sedalia, Missouri, to Kansas. McCoy offered two sensible reasons, the first being a combination stockyards and a railroad station in Kansas made for shorter cattle drives up from Texas, and that meant less wear and tear on the beef. The other reason was a tad more complicated.
Though the Civil War had ended two years earlier and the free state versus slave state issue was thus rendered moot, Jayhawkers still existed. Most of them were men mustered out of the military who were unable or unwilling to find gainful employment. Instead, groups of Jayhawkers patrolled the prairie for cattle being driven north and east, and they exacted a form of protection. Trail bosses were offered safe passage in exchange for tribute, the exact amount determined by the size of the herd or the number of guns backing the boss up. A shorter and more direct route to a rail hub would make it easier for the trail drovers to protect themselves, and the Jayhawkers would eventually, finally, fade away.
To his surprise, McCoy’s proposal was rejected. The executives did not trust the young stranger enough to make such an expensive move, and they feared the jilted Jayhawkers would turn their attention to the railroad itself. Plan B: McCoy bought a Kansas Pacific ticket and rode the rails until they ended, which at that time was at a water station in Ellis, Kansas. There he gathered what maps he could and saw that the small town of Abilene 130 miles to the east was directly north of Caldwell, the first stop in Kansas on the Chisholm Trail. He had actually passed Abilene on his way west and recalled it did not have a station; the train had slowed only to toss out a bag of mail. It may have taken a few dollars, but during the return trip, McCoy persuaded the train crew to stop and let him off on the side of the tracks in Abilene.
According to the historian Robert Dykstra in The Cattle Towns, McCoy was “a slender figure in unpretentious garb—heavy boots, short topcoat, black slouch hat—the goatee that hid a weak chin lending age to his twenty-nine years, his bland, ascetic visage concealing qualities both good and bad: a brilliant entrepreneurial imagination, a tenacious fixity of purpose, but also a somewhat undisciplined ego that frequently impelled him to an overconfidence in his personal mastery.”
The townsfolk were polite enough to the stranger, and McCoy was directed to the home of Timothy Hersey. It was something of a passing-of-the-baton meeting. Hersey took his visitor on a ride south to the Smoky Hill River. There, McCoy observed bottomland bursting with buffalo grass, an easily fordable river, and pure drinking water. By July, he was a landowner on the east side of the Smoky Hill.
With some urgency, before someone else had the same idea but for a different town, McCoy set about having stockyards constructed. Lumber arrived from Hannibal, Missouri, and the Kansas Pacific was happy enough to take his money for railroad ties. While this project was progressing, the brothers James and William McCoy went south to Texas to spread circulars, take out advertisements in newspapers, and personally visit ranchers to let it be known that Abilene was the place to send and sell their cattle. From Abilene, Joseph McCoy dispatched a work crew to extend and mark the Chisholm Trail from Caldwell north.
Next on his to-do list was to build Drovers Cottage.1 The name does not do justice to McCoy’s plans—it would be for drovers as well as other businessmen, all right, but would hardly be a modest cottage. There would be eighty rooms, a spacious dining room, and a saloon with comfortable furnishings and the best liquor, certainly not any sod-house swill. McCoy wanted Abilene to be ready, willing, and able to accommodate the expected herds of prime beef from Texas.
He miscalculated, in the sense that his vision was realized too quickly. When cattle began to arrive, the construction projects remained incomplete and buyers from the big cities had not yet come to town. Tents and other temporary structures were erected to contain the first hundreds of head of cattle. Then a bigger herd arrived, owned by Colonel O. W. Wheeler, who was from California but was partnered with two Texans. Their original plan had been to take the cattle bought in the Lone Star State and drive them to Kansas, then make a left turn and head west to California. But along the way, the cattlemen were bedeviled by horrible weather, Indians, and a cholera outbreak. When Wheeler and his partners, in a sour mood and ready to abandon their plan, got to Caldwell, they were told about what the McCoy brothers were trying to do in Abilene. Wheeler went there to see if the herd could be sold.
By the time he arrived, so had buyers. Wheeler was wined and dined in what was a partially completed dining room in the Drovers Cottage. His nightmare was over. He sold his herd, and on September 5, 1867, the train that headed east from Abilene carried car after car of cattle. By the end of the year, thirty-five thousand head were shipped. The McCoys had a financial piece of every cow.
During the next three years, there were some setbacks, including the flooding of the town caused by an overflowing Mud Creek, fears of “Spanish fever” that made some buyers look elsewhere for beef,2 and periods of drought and dust storms. But otherwise, Abilene prospered. Through 1870, there was a steady stream of Texas cattle going from the trail to the stockyards in Abilene, then onto train cars taking them to the eastern markets. Abilene was by no means the first Kansas cow town, but it became the busiest one as saloons and boardinghouses and dance halls and various shops blossomed. The previous year, 1869, saw 160,000 head of cattle be shipped out of the city.
And all that beef was escorted north by cowboys, who became increasingly trail-weary and thirsty as they went. In his Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade of the West and Southwest, Joseph McCoy offers a vivid portrait of this particular human species based on his Abilene observations:
He lives hard, works hard, has but a few comforts and fewer necessities. He has but little, if any, taste for reading. He enjoys a coarse practical joke or a smutty story; loves danger but abhors labor of the common kind; never tires riding, never wants to walk, no matter how short the distance he desires to go. He would rather fight with pistols than pray; loves tobacco, liquor and women better than any other trinity. His clothes are coarse and substantial, few in number and often of the gaudy pattern. The “sombrero” and large spurs are inevitable accompaniments.
Appropriately, Texas Street—more a section of town than a single street—was the epicenter of exuberant cowboy merriment. The whiskey and the women were cheap, and there was plenty of the former. Alas, before long, life was considered cheap, too. With guns as readily available as shots of whiskey, confrontations quickly escalated. This could be bad for business. Drovers Cottage had been finished and was regarded as the best hotel to be found west of Kansas City until Denver, and it was seeking to cater to a moneyed clientele. However, Abilene’s reputation was more based on its being an anything-goes oasis for parched and lusty men who had spent weeks in clouds of dust and insects on the trails up from Texas.
According to Stewart Verckler in Cowtown Abilene, the typical Texas cowboy in town
gulped his whiskey straight at the bar of the many saloons. He was quick to anger and argue, having a short temper, but would side quickly with another who had ridden the trail with him. He did not get a large sum of money for riding the trail [; his] salary would vary from fifteen to twenty dollars per month. His money was gone in less than a week, and there was always another trail herd on the way, the merchants and saloonkeepers thought. The cowboy would have no regrets about shooting up a saloon. They had courage, six-gun courage.
Joseph McCoy, T. C. Henry, and other business and civic leaders were having some misgivings about what they had created. Sure, they were making money hand over fist, but such prosperity would be short-lived if a pile of dead cowboys persuaded trail bosses to take their herds elsewhere. The ongoing westward extension of the railroads was creating other candidates. And cowboys killing cowboys was one thing; worse would be the violence getting so out of hand that everyday citizens, even women and children, were becoming caught in the cross fire.
The local government, with Henry as mayor, desired law enforcement. However, the first two marshals hired were chased out of town by gleeful cowboy gunfire. Chaos continued to threaten to reign, with each herd arriving bringing with it cowboys seeming to be thirstier and rowdier than the last batch. But there would soon be a new marshal in town: one day in the spring of 1870, Tom Smith rode into town and tied up his two matching gray horses in front of T. C. Henry’s real estate office.
Thomas “Bear River” Smith had earned a good reputation as a bare-knuckled battler of crime in the New York City Police Department, with his beat including the brutal Bowery section. It sounds like a bit of blarney, but an account offered by the Abilene historian Henry Jameson contends that sometime during the Civil War, Smith was chasing a teenage robber down an alley, and when he stumbled, his gun discharged, killing the boy. Feeling guilt over this tragedy and shying away from the resulting headlines, and mourning the recent death of his mother, Smith—who had also been a prizefighter known as the “Slugging Newsboy”—decided to start over away from New York and its mean streets. Whatever the real motivation was, Smith left New York and wound up in Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado as a freight hauler. His nickname was earned when working construction for the Union Pacific Railroad in the Bear River area of Wyoming in 1868.
In the towns there, off-duty railroad workers could be like the rowdy trail riders in the Kansas cow towns. In some settlements, vigilance committees were formed to apprehend the most drunk and belligerent. One day, three railroad workers were nabbed, and preparations were under way to hang them. Smith led a sort of vigilante group of his own, which freed the workers, burned down the jail, and apprehended several committee members. Things escalated to gunfire between the two sides, with fourteen men being killed and Smith wounded by a man named Nuckles. Peace was restored only after army cavalry arrived.
A recuperating Smith was appointed marshal of the Bear River settlement. The following year found him as marshal of a town named after Kit Carson in Colorado. What he had learned from his previous experience was that pistols provoked more violence than they prevented, so he no longer wore a gun, but the former pugilist did his policing with his fists.
It is not known how Smith came to stop in at Abilene in 1870. He may have visited remaining family back in New York the previous fall and was moseying west when he heard of Abilene’s troubles and applied for the job of peace officer. Smith seemed to be a man who relished a challenge.
That he was not immediately appointed marshal demonstrated the city’s dysfunction. Going from east to west, Smith had spent the winter in St. Louis, then in Kansas City. His aim was to continue west and discover more of what the Great American Desert was all about. But in Abilene, he walked inside Henry’s office and applied for the job. He then met with the board of trustees. They liked him a lot … which was a big reason why Smith was rejected. Mayor Henry explained that with the short life expectancy of Abilene marshals—which would be even shorter for one who didn’t carry a gun—they didn’t want him to get killed. Best he continue on his journey west and stay healthy.
Smith replied he was on his way to visit friends in Ellis, and he could be reached there if the trustees changed their minds. It did not take them long to do so. The simple version of a convoluted tale is that optimistic lawmakers in Abilene had a jail erected. It was just a stone-walled single cell with two barred windows, but to the cowboys, it still was like waving a red towel in front of a bull. Soon after construction finished, cowboys gathered and tore it down. To further emphasize their displeasure, they distributed the stones all over town. After this happened again to a second jail, Mayor Henry sent a wire to Ellis.
Smith returned, to a hefty salary of $150 a month plus bonuses for the convictions of men he had arrested for serious crimes. The citizens of Abilene found their new marshal to be a thirty-year-old, soft-spoken, slender man just under six feet tall, whose speech reflected the Ireland his parents had emigrated from. He had auburn hair, a thick mustache, and strong shoulders and hands from his recent years of labor and being a good boxer. Smith was a devout Catholic and did not curse or drink alcohol. And he still wouldn’t display a gun, though he agreed to keep one concealed under his coat. Some of those citizens wagered on how long Smith would last, with the shortest tenure getting the best odds.
His first act was to repost signs the cowboys had taken down declaring no firearms were allowed within the Abilene city limits. Next, he climbed on one of his two gray horses and rode to the Texas Street section. Watching him go, Mayor Henry, Joseph McCoy, and others wondered if Smith would even last until sundown. But the new marshal had a new strategy—given that he had no staff, he would sort of deputize the saloonkeepers. He persuaded them, and hotel managers, to put up signs telling patrons to deposit their guns with the proprietors. Cowboys and other customers might still get drunk and rowdy, but gunplay would not be involved. Surprisingly, everyone agreed to the new system.
However, it wasn’t long before it was challenged. J. B. Edwards, an Abilene resident until his death at 106,3 recorded in his diaries a confrontation that took place in 1870. A cowboy known as Big Hank, wearing two six-shooters and backed “by a gang of gun-swinging, smirking cronies,” accosted Smith on the street, with Big Hank boasting that no one could ever disarm him.
“Look, mister,” Smith responded, “I am employed as marshal and shall try to maintain order and enforce the law. Be sensible about this and don’t make any trouble.” He added, “I must trouble you to hand me your gun.”
“The hell you say,” Big Hank said. “No redheaded SOB wearing a tin badge is going to take my gun!”
Seconds later, the big Texan was crumpled in the street. At first, he was unaware that he had been introduced to Smith’s pugilistic prowess. When he came to, he needed little persuasion to get on his horse and ride away. His “cronies” were allowed to stay, after they turned in their guns. The marshal explained his philosophy of policing to Mayor Henry: “Anyone can bring in a dead man, but to my way of thinking a good officer is one who brings them in alive.”
The felling of Big Hank did not stop the challenges; in fact, it led to another within a couple of days. The “unfair” treatment the visitor to Abilene had received was discussed at the cowboy camps, and deciding to do something about it was a fellow known as Wyoming Frank. Wearing his guns for all to see, Frank paraded up and down the main street until Marshal Smith appeared and walked toward him.
The intensity of Smith’s gaze had Frank stepping backward, but he did refuse the request to hand over his six-shooters. Smith kept backing him up until Frank felt the doors of a saloon behind him. A crowd gathered around, a few covering their ears as Frank used a few choice words to refuse another request. Smith punched him in the face twice, then took Frank’s guns and beat him over the head with them. After being told to leave town, with a return to Wyoming being a good option, Frank staggered to his feet, found his horse, and was woozily on his way.
Awed by the dynamic display, the crowd was in stunned silence. Suddenly, the saloonkeeper emerged and said to Smith, “That was the nerviest act I ever saw. Here is my gun. I reckon I’ll not need it so long as you are marshal of this town.”
According to Edwards’s diaries, Smith practiced this peacekeeping technique in other confrontations almost identical to the ones with Big Hank and Wyoming Frank. “Smith was the master,” the Abilene historian Henry Jameson declared. “He became popular with the merchants, gamblers, citizens, saloonkeepers, and even most of the cowboys. Now and then he had to clip a newcomer—once slugging a guy so hard it cut his tongue in half.”
So how was it there was an opening for Wild Bill Hickok in Abilene? Marshal Smith did some moonlighting as a deputy U.S. marshal, and on November 2, 1870, he was asked by James McDonald, the sheriff of Dickinson County, to help serve a warrant on Andrew McConnell and Moses Miles. The Scottish farmers were not known for their hospitality, and McConnell’s record included being tried for murder, though being acquitted for self-defense. McDonald had once been Smith’s deputy, and he asked the Abilene marshal to go along on the job in his capacity as a federal officer.
McConnell and Miles saw the two men riding their way, and instead of waiting to hear the charge (it was a minor one), they barricaded themselves in the dugout that was their residence. McDonald kept asking them to come out. Finally, an impatient Smith grabbed the warrant and busted the door open. McDonald followed him in, and soon there was a brawl involving all four men. The sheriff was not nearly the fighter Smith was, and at the first opportunity, he fled the dugout. Miles, now free, grabbed a rifle and shot Smith in the chest. This did not kill him, and he and McConnell continued to struggle. Miles exchanged the rifle for an ax and brought it down on Smith, nearly decapitating him. The two Scotsmen left the dead marshal where he was, and they took off even faster than McDonald had done.
A posse eventually found McConnell and Miles. They were tried and convicted and sent to prison. Smith was buried in a small cemetery. In 1904, the grave was relocated and a large granite boulder was erected that proclaimed Tom Smith a “Fearless Hero of the Frontier Days.”4
Abilene was not quick to replace its marshal. This probably had to do with the time of year. Smith died at the time when the cattle trade was winding down. With policing not a priority and business in general slow during the winter months when whiteout blizzards burst out of the Plains, the local government preferred to save the $150 a month. As spring of 1871 approached, though, saving salary was not as important.
Given the grisly fate of his predecessor, why did Hickok take the job? Boredom was one reason. As dangerous as the Hays City position had been, it was also exciting. Gambling and dalliances with dancing girls were fine, but they weren’t occupations; they were interludes between more interesting and meaningful pursuits. They also did not provide a steady income. Hickok calculated, correctly, that an overture from a troubled town like Abilene would be backed up by some good pay. Hence, he would again wear a peace officer’s badge, for the same salary as Smith received.
One more reason: by the spring of 1871, Wild Bill had grown accustomed to being the most famous figure on the American frontier. True, being a target of ambitious or simply psychotic gunslingers came with that, but Hickok was used to this by now. He took the proper precautions, and no one had gunned him down yet. Taming a town that was becoming infamous for violence and debauchery would be a huge achievement for any lawman, but if he did it—and survived, unlike the unfortunate Tom Smith—the legend of Wild Bill would eclipse all others. Add a dash of ego: after Smith, the next marshal of Abilene had a lot to live up to, and only Wild Bill Hickok was the man for the job.
That spring, Joseph McCoy was elected mayor to replace T. C. Henry. The sordid scenario that had played out in the city before Tom Smith arrived was still vivid in McCoy’s mind. “We were used to seeing men killed because someone disliked their looks, the color of their eyes, the cut of their clothes, or the refusal of a drink, or because they danced too much with one girl,” he wrote in Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade.
So, on April 15, the new mayor swore Hickok in as the new marshal. In addition to his salary, Hickok would earn 25 percent of all fines collected. Before long, the pot was sweetened when the new top peace officer was paid an additional fifty cents for every stray dog deemed worthy of execution.