Revenge
The McCluskies
There were family groups that stayed on the right side of the law, as well as those who broke it. Notable examples are the Masterson boys, Bat, Ed, and Jim, all of them pillars of the law, but they don’t make this book because they were among the Good Guys. But an exception is made to tell the remarkable tale of the McCluskie boys.
They weren’t outlaws as far as history records; bad blood was not apparent in their lives, although they were no strangers to violence, and there is evidence that McCluskie was not the name with which they started life. But they find a place here because of their courage and fighting ability, their fierce brotherly loyalty to each other, and, in particular, the way their story ends.
Back in 1871, the town of Newton, Kansas, could safely be called hell on wheels. Newton wasn’t much of a place by eastern standards, but in that far-off year it had a certain importance it would never know again. For Newton sat along the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, and it was then the northern terminus of the Chisholm Trail. Up that trail came the great herds of Texas beef bound for the eastern markets, and with the herds came the cowboys.
The cowboys were Texans, mostly. Wherever they came from, most of them were wild youngsters, tough, wiry, and full of vinegar. By the time they finished a drive, they had been forty to seventy days on the trail. They had braved stampedes, rustlers, bad water, worse food, and weeks of sweat-soaked, saddle-sore riding to bring the great herds to the railhead. They were ready for some fun, and they had money in their jeans.
Now fun, after the obligatory bath, haircut, and restaurant meal—and sometimes before these things—meant booze, women, and gambling, and lots of at least the first two. Like the other wild Kansas railhead towns, Abilene, Caldwell, Dodge City, and the rest, Newton in its heyday attracted swarms of both amateur and professional whores, cardsharps, booze peddlers, feather merchants, and an assortment of just plain hoodlums.
Stirring all these transient predators together with a flock of tough Texans was a sure recipe for big trouble. The cowboys went armed as a matter of course, and so did the bar owners and the gamblers and the pimps (“blacksmith” was a favorite euphemism for this ancient and unpleasant trade, as in “he blacksmithed for Sadie”). In spite of ordinances that prohibited carrying sidearms within the city limits, the cow towns saw a lot of quarrels settled abruptly in a whiff of gunpowder smoke. So it was in Newton.
The railroad came to Newton in July 1871. The Santa Fe line was built to cut off rival Kansas Pacific’s beef terminus in Abilene, to the north. Newton boasted about fifteen hundred inhabitants in that year, together with a cluster of raw wood buildings and some tents. The first building—a blacksmith shop—was completed only in mid-April, but by late summer the town comprised about two hundred structures of one kind or another. The main street was either glutinous, bottomless bog or unyielding hardpan, depending on the weather.
The “pleasure section” of the town, down in its southeast corner, was called “Hide Park,” although whether the reference was to skin bovine, or human, or both, is now lost in the mist of time. You could buy firewater in twenty-seven different establishments, large and small. The Gold Room was Newton’s swank watering hole, but you could drown your sorrows in the Bull’s Head and the Lone Star, too, and a couple of dozen other places.
In any case, Newton quickly won the unenviable title of “the wickedest town in Kansas,” which, as one Kansan neatly put it, “was going some, for Kansas in the past has had some towns that in a competitive examination for wickedness would give hell a neck and neck race.”
Newton would not even be formally incorporated until the early part of 1872, when Harvey County was also created. Just now, in the summer of 1871, it may not have been formally a city, but it sure was busy.
Hide Park’s chief emporia were two big dance halls, separated by about thirty yards. Ed Krum owned one, the Alamo. Tuttle’s Dance Hall, owned by Perry Tuttle, was the other. There were other buildings close by from which the local soiled doves also plied their ancient profession. Since Hide Park was never an oasis of peace, the town had hired an enforcer, a husky quasi lawman named Mike McCluskie. He was appointed the “night policeman,” and to him fell the herculean task of keeping whatever passed for order in Hide Park.
McCluskie was not the name by which Mike’s mother would have known him, for he’d begun life as Arthur Delaney (or maybe it was Donovan). Since many of the cow town denizens had experienced trouble elsewhere, bogus identities were not uncommon. Indeed, a fresh name was often downright essential to any kind of comfortable survival. So it was with McCluskie, who, it was said, had departed his native Missouri in unseemly haste. By trade he was an ironfisted railroad section boss, and he was a tough customer by anybody’s definition.
The trouble began on the eleventh of August 1871, a Friday. The city was voting on a bond proposal, and the polls were protected by a special policeman hired for the day, a Texan by the name of William Bailey. Bailey—or Baylor, his real name—had something of a reputation, having killed a couple of men someplace in Texas, and he was pushy and unpleasant.
Bailey was, as one commentator put it, “the very worst choice for such duty. As a peace officer, he was no more than a very dangerous clown with a badge.”
To make matters worse, Bailey had spent election morning getting soused, and in the afternoon he began to harass the election officials. They called in McCluskie, who had struck sparks with Bailey before this.
McCluskie dealt with the drunken Bailey somewhat summarily. He simply yanked him out on the street, where he called Bailey every dirty name in the book, astonishing even the tough citizens of Newton with his eloquence.
It was not the kind of humiliation a Texas bad man could stomach.
And so that evening Bailey, still quite drunk or maybe more so, found McCluskie in front of the Red Front saloon and demanded McCluskie buy drinks for the large crowd present. McCluskie, of course, was having none of that. The argument moved inside the saloon, and, one thing leading to another, Bailey rashly attacked big McCluskie with his fists. That turned out to be unwise, for McCluskie smote Bailey mightily in the forehead with his fist, sending him reeling through the saloon doors into the street.
McCluskie followed his foe into the dusty street and found Bailey leaning against a hitching post, clutching a revolver. McCluskie dug for his own weapon and fired twice, Bailey went down with a bullet under the heart, and the fight was over. Bailey lingered until the morning, and thereafter was duly transported to Newton’s Boot Hill.
That should have been the end of the fight, but it wasn’t. In the nature of things on the frontier, a man’s friends were inclined to take up his quarrels and carry them on. So it was in this case. For although McCluskie thoughtfully departed on the morning train to let Newton cool off, some of Bailey’s Texan friends brooded together and swore vengeance.
And so, when McCluskie returned to Newton, there was big trouble waiting for him. Most of it came from a group of cowboys led by one Hugh Anderson, a wild youngster who had recently come to Newton with his father’s Texas herd. Anderson had something of a reputation himself, earned in a couple of shooting scrapes back in Bell County, Texas.
McCluskie, apparently unaware of his mortal danger, or just uncaring, returned to town on Saturday and that evening betook himself to Perry Tuttle’s to drink and gamble. He sat happily at a corner table and did not seem worried, even though several friends had warned him that the Texans were out to kill him. Tuttle knew trouble was on the way. At one point he even tried to close his doors to head it off, but the patrons roared their disapproval. Even after he sent his band home, the place remained full and booming.
McCluskie continued to act unconcerned when several Texans approached his table and one of them even sat down to talk to him. What McCluskie did not know was that the Texans had sent for Anderson and now were simply waiting for the fireworks.
They did not have long. A little past midnight, Anderson bulled up to McCluskie’s table, his revolver already in his fist, and the Texan supporting players moved back to give Anderson room. “You are a cowardly son-of-a-bitch!” roared Anderson. “I’ll blow the top of your head off!”
Suiting the action to the word, Anderson blazed away. Though he may have aimed at McCluskie’s head, his slug slammed into McCluskie’s neck. Game to the end, blood pouring from his throat, McCluskie stood up, jerked out his Colt, leveled it, pulled the trigger . . . and the weapon misfired.
Anderson fired again, hitting McCluskie in the leg and knocking him down. McCluskie got his six-gun to working now, but he was apparently too badly hurt to hit his foe even at this point-blank range. Anderson kept on firing, hitting McCluskie again in the body. About this time shooting became general in Tuttle’s, although the exact sequence of events has vanished forever in the powder smoke. Several patrons had pulled their revolvers, and men began to fall.
Now enters another leading player in the fight at Tuttle’s. He was an unlikely desperado, a sickly, slim waif of about eighteen years of age named Jim Riley. One Harvey County judge called Riley “quiet and inoffensive in deportment,” and so he had been . . . until that night. Riley had wandered into Newton from who knew where, broke and coughing badly from tuberculosis, and McCluskie had sheltered him, fed him, and befriended him. Now Riley saw his friend and benefactor bleeding on the saloon floor.
Riley calmly turned and locked the saloon door and then pulled his revolver and went to killing. Since a good many folks were banging away in various directions, nobody ever knew for sure exactly who shot whom when, but it is certain that Riley was absolutely intent on ventilating the man who had downed McCluskie.
And when the smoke at last blew away, Perry Tuttle’s place was a shambles. Anderson was down with two wicked leg wounds. A cowboy by the name of Martin was bleeding to death from a throat wound. Two railroad men, Lee and Hickey, had been badly wounded; Lee, shot in the gut, would not survive. Scattered across the blood-splattered saloon floor were cowboys Billy Garrett and Henry Kearnes, dying of bullets in the throat and chest. Two other cowboys were wounded.
Not long after the sun came up that Sunday morning, the city held an inquest. Riley had sensibly departed Newton for more congenial climes, but a warrant was issued for Anderson after McCluskie died about eight o’clock, although it was not served because of the young Texan’s perilous condition. But Anderson’s father had already schemed to protect his vicious son, worried not only about his two severe wounds but also about the townsmen’s talk of a summary necktie party.
Anderson Sr. arranged with the worried city fathers of Newton to smuggle his wastrel offspring out of town by railroad, concealed in the closet of a passenger car. The Texans successfully got Anderson aboard the train in the darkness before dawn and safely through to sophisticated medical treatment in Kansas City. The doctors saved his life, but he did not keep it long, as we shall see.
Nobody knows what happened to Riley. A headline in the Topeka Kansas Daily Commonwealth said simply “The Desperadoes ‘Vamoosed,’ ” without elaboration. One story has Riley dying of his tuberculosis in Colorado—shades of Doc Holliday. Another says he was killed out west, in New Mexico or Arizona. Whatever happened to the deadly young man, his disappearance and Anderson’s serious wounds and flight should have ended the saga of Tuttle’s Dance Hall.
But they didn’t.
One version of the end of this story, a relatively tame one, says only that Anderson, crippled by his Newton wounds, died in Texas a few years after the fight. However, there is also another, much more lurid and far more satisfying finale to the saga of the great Newton gunfight.
The story of the second ending is said to have appeared in the Reading, Pennsylvania, newspaper Gazette and Democrat on August 2, 1873. The writer is supposed to have been a “correspondent of the New York World,” who wrote the tale from Medicine Lodge, Kansas. Precisely why the World would have a correspondent in benighted little Medicine Lodge, and how the Gazette and Democrat came by the story, are lost in the mists of the past.
Nevertheless, the account did describe Medicine Lodge much as it was in those days, so maybe the story is actually true. True or not, it is dandy melodrama, infinitely more interesting than the tame version that has Hugh Anderson dying in bed in Texas. Here it is.
This last act was not written until two summers later, and it was played out in Medicine Lodge, which was only a wide spot in the trail in those days. There were a couple of “good-sized buildings used for storage,” but otherwise the settlement boasted only five houses, a hotel of sorts, and a two-room log trading post that doubled as a saloon.
In June of 1873, into tiny Medicine Lodge rode another McCluskie, a big, husky brother called Arthur. He was “a handsome brute in a buckskin suit,” and he announced that he was looking for Hugh Anderson. Anderson was in town all right, tending bar, and McCluskie lost no time in sending in a semiformal choose-your-own-weapons challenge to mortal combat.
Anderson chose pistols, being somewhat smaller than his challenger, and maybe remembering what happened to Bailey when he closed with Mike McCluskie back in Newton. Anyhow, the two men arranged to duel in the grand old style, standing twenty paces apart with their backs turned. They would then whirl to confront each other, signaled by a shot fired by a huge, bearded gent called Harding, owner of the trading-post-cum-bar and Anderson’s boss.
Not much exciting was wont to happen in minuscule Medicine Lodge, and so the duel drew a crowd—perhaps seventy men were on hand to watch the bloodshed, and that was surely a multitude for the town. There was some betting by the spectators and general hopeful expectation of a really entertaining fight. In the event, nobody was going to be disappointed.
It is hard to imagine two experienced frontiersmen missing each other at twenty paces, but that is exactly what they did. With his second shot, however, McCluskie broke Anderson’s left arm. As he went down, Anderson drove a slug through McCluskie’s mouth, and McCluskie rushed him, spewing out blood and teeth and working his pistol. Anderson kept shooting back, coolly hitting McCluskie again and again, until the big man’s legs would no longer hold him up.
Both men were running out of ammunition now, but neither one would quit. Some of the bystanders, appalled by the blood and the pit bull spirit of the fighters, began to call for an end to the fight. Harding would not stop it, however. The terms had been a fight to the death—both men had agreed, and that was that. And so it went on.
On the ground, body torn with bullets but still game, McCluskie nailed Anderson with a bullet in the belly. The impact of the slug, probably McCluskie’s last round, knocked the Texan on his back. Now McCluskie, knife in hand, began to drag himself across the ground toward his foe, leaving a trail of blood as he crawled. As he reached Anderson, the blood-splashed Texan made one last effort, heaving himself to a sitting position and slashing McCluskie’s throat with his knife. McCluskie sank his own blade into Anderson’s side, and both men collapsed in the dust.
The fight was finished, and so were both fighters. There was nothing left now but to bury what remained of the contestants, and that solemn task was duly attended to. Both men were unceremoniously wrapped in hides and trucked off to an unmarked common grave; as far as anybody knows, they are there yet, waiting together for the last trumpet. They did have a memorial of sorts, a ballad by poet Richard Wheeler, which goes in part like this:
There’s a spot in the town of Medicine Lodge,
Where a pair who fought till they died,
Have been laid away
Till the Judgment Day
And are waiting it side by side.