Dave Cook was sheriff for several terms. He formed the Rocky Mountain Detective Association, a network of law officers that stretched from Wyoming to New Mexico, and was a thorn in the side of outlaws for years. He was a lawman, in one capacity or another, for forty years, and during that time, Dave and his association arrested thousands of criminals and solved several hundred murders.
In 1895, John Wesley Hardin, while drinking and playing dice in the Acme Saloon in El Paso, was shot in the back of the head by John Selman. Selman was killed the next year by lawman George Scarborough in an alley outside a saloon in El Paso.
James H. Levy, born in Ireland in the early 1840s, of a Jewish father and Irish mother, killed his first man in Pioche, Nevada. It is rumored that he had to borrow a pistol to do that! In his decade-long career as a gunfighter, gambler, and guard for various mining operations, the tough little Jewish/Irish immigrant is credited with killing at least sixteen men (some say the total is twice that), in stand-up, face-to-face gunfights. Levy roamed all over the Southwest, several times traveling as far north as Wyoming, where he killed at least one man outside a saloon in Cheyenne. In Tucson, Arizona, in 1882, after a faro dealer made some disparaging remarks about Jim’s ancestry (and Jews in particular), Jim told the man to meet him outside, then left for his hotel room to get his gun. The faro dealer gathered up several of his friends, and they hid along the street and ambushed Jim, emptying their guns into him. When the marshal inspected Jim’s bullet-riddled body, he found the man was unarmed. His killers were never brought to trial.
By the time Colorado became a state, in 1876, Valley was recognized as having the finest school system in all the state. A private fine arts college was established there in 1900 and is still flourishing.
Jamie and Kate’s home was turned into a visitors’ museum and was open to the public for years, before being returned to the MacCallister estate. It was completely restored in the late 1960s, and one of Jamie and Kate’s great-great-great-grandsons and family now live there.
Ben Thompson returned to Austin in 1875, and the next year killed two men in the Senate Saloon. Despite being a convicted felon, Ben was elected city marshal of Austin in 1881, but resigned the next year, after killing several men. Ben Thompson became an alcoholic and in 1884 was killed by Joe Foster and William Simms while watching a show at the Vaudeville Theater in San Antonio. Although he had been shot nine times, Thompson still managed to get his pistols out and put lead into Joe Foster before he died. One of Foster’s legs had to be amputated, and he died three days later.
After the town was laid out, it was named Hot Springs and remained that way for years. On the tenth anniversary of the radio program “Truth or Consequences,” the town accepted an offer to name itself after the show.
That power play certainly would have been attempted had not Jamie and the others forced the Kermit brothers’ hand that late winter’s night in the border town and all but wiped out the male members of the Kermit family. King Fisher continued his lawless ways until about 1883. Then he reportedly “got religion” and moved his family to Uvalde County and became a deputy sheriff. On March 11, 1884, Fisher was attending a show at the Vaudeville Theater in San Antonio with his gunfighter friend, the English born Ben Thompson. Joe Foster and William Simms, aided by Canada Bill and Harry Tremaine, suddenly opened fire on the two men, killing both Thompson and Fisher. Fisher was shot a dozen times in the head and chest. John “King” Fisher was thirty years old.
The government had just declared Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull and those warriors who followed them to be hostile Indians. A few months later, they would order all Indians in the Black Hills to be removed to reservations or face military force. When the Indians refused to budge, Lt. Colonel George Armstrong Custer and his Seventh Cavalry would be ordered in.