Johnny D. Boggs - Great Murder Trials of the Old West

Johnny D. Boggs

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Boggs, Johnny D.

Great murder trials of the Old West / Johnny D. boggs.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-55622-892-9 (alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-55622-892-6

1. Trials (Murder)--West (U.S.) I. Title.

KF221.M8 B64 2002

345.78'02523--dc21

2002015433

2003, Johnny D. Boggs

All Rights Reserved

Republic of Texas Press is an imprint of Wordware Publishing, Inc.
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Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 1-55622-892-9
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0209

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For my former roomate Kurt Iverson,

neither a lawyer nor a criminal
(as far as I know)

Take a deep breath. OK. Here goes. I could not have written this book without help from the following:

Anne M. Allis, University of Texas at El Paso Library Special Collections; Allison Baker, Dallas Public Library; Joyce Brunken, Yankton Community Library; Carolyn Couch, Oklahoma Historical Society; Barbara Dey, Colorado Historical Society; William H. Davis and Michael E. Pilgrim, National Archives, Washington, D.C.; Brenda Dickey and LaNell Williams, Comanche County District Clerks office, Comanche, Texas; Stef Donev of Bakersfield, California; Carol Downey, Arizona State Archives; Marilyn F. Finke, National Archives-Central Plains Region, Kansas City, Missouri; Terri M. Grant, El Paso Public Library; Becky Gray, Tulsa City-County (Oklahoma) Library; Casey Edward Greene, Rosenberg Library, Galveston, Texas; Valerie Hanson, South Dakota State Archives; Barton Hill, Victoria (Texas) Public Library; Ken Hodgson of San Angelo, Texas; Jeanette Lundquist, Deadwood (South Dakota) Public Library; Patty Mark, Rockingham Free Public Library, Bellows Falls, Vermont; Sheri Neufeld, Tucson-Pima (Arizona) Public Library; Mark Pendleton, Branigan Library, Las Cruces, New Mexico; Lyn Spenst, Denver Public Library; Thadd Turner of Deadwood, South Dakota, and Cave Creek, Arizona; and the staffs of the Oklahoma City, San Francisco, and Santa Fe public libraries and the New Mexico State Library.

A special thanks goes to Susan Corbett of Fort Worth, Texas, who handled the first round of editing before I shipped this book off to editor Ginnie Bivona and the other powers-that-be at Republic of Texas Press.

The images of frontier justice are clear: A tall, strong lawman stepping off a Dodge City boardwalk onto a dusty street to face down some outlaw with a gun to make Kansas safe for folks like Miss Kitty and Doc Adams.... Or a quiet ex-gunman forced to strap on his nickel-plated Colt one more time to rid a Wyoming valley of heartless, murdering robber barons and make the territory safe for folks like Van Heflin and Jean Arthur. Nice stories, certainly, but Matthew Dillon only walked the streets of a CBS back lot and other film sets, and the man called Shane was a figment of novelist Jack Schaefers imagination, George Stevenss direction, and Alan Ladds acting.

Pure fiction. The frontier always seemed mythical, so it stands to reason that the vision we see is mostly bunk. Thats what the historians tell us, and they should know. Mano-a-mano gunfights on empty streets rarely happenedand who could shoot straight in a smoky saloon after several shots of red-eye?while only an idiot would give a murderous opponent the opportunity to draw first.

Think in terms of American history, though, and similar images, though certainly less Arthurian or Homeric than the traditional western scenes cited above, come to mind: Vigilantes upholding the law with a peculiar sense of justice and hemp rope in mining camps across the Rocky Mountain West.... Wild Bill Hickok, Pat Garrett, and the Earp Brothers wielding their own brand of law with revolvers, fists and badges.... Or cattlemen taking matters into their own hands when it came to dealing with horse thieves, rustlers or, sometimes, smaller ranchers.

To paraphrase many a fictional character, where there aint no law, you make your own. Yet, eventually, the law came to Dodge City, to Texas and Wyoming, to the entire Westand it came rather quickly. Federal and state courts brought the scales of justice to Western territories and new states. Lawyers hung their shingles from Texas to Montana and Missouri to California. Judges read law books and settled cases and lawsuits. When an ominous range war threatened an honest ranchers livelihood, you can bet your boots that his or her first trip wasnt to see the closest and fastest hired gun, but rather to sit down with an attorney at law. Maybe the Nebraska pioneer never came face-to-face with Judge Judy or watched Court TV on cable, but there was law. Real law. Not just Judge Roy Bean and his Law West of the Pecos.

Hey, Judge Issac Parker did send seventy-nine convicted felons to the gallows in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and plenty of outlaws faced juries of their peers in legal proceedings. Yet whether we read fiction or nonfiction, frontier justice seldom conveys images of barristers and courtrooms.

The idea for this book began in the late 1990s while researching a trilogy of historical novels I planned on writing regarding murder trials in the West (my Guns and Gavel series with Signet-Dutton). The eight trials included here arent part of that fictional series because in these cases, I guess, truth is stranger than fiction. What follows is a sampling of murder trials in the Wild Westlegal trials, civilian or military, not miners courts or vigilante justice, although I do touch upon the miners court in the Jack McCall case. Some of the defendants, such as John Wesley Hardin, and some victims, such as Wild Bill Hickok, are well known even today. Many cases have been overlooked by history, but each case turned out to become, to varying degrees, a media sensation in its time.

So some things have not changed over the past hundred-plus years. The public and the press still love a good murder trial.

Johnny D. Boggs

Santa Fe, New Mexico

I am ready to die

Fort Klamath, Oregon, 1873

Like many frontier conflicts between Indians and the newer Americans, the Modoc War was a fight for land.

White settlers began pouring into southern Oregon and northern California during the Gold Rush of the 1840s, and many became fascinated with the Lost River Valley and Tule Lake. Along the Oregon-California border, the area, while harsh (its home today to Lava Beds National Monument), had much to offer. Thats why the Modoc Indians called it home.

The first inhabitants of the region appeared sometime between 7000 and 5500 B.C. With the end of the volcanic activity in the 1400s, the ancestors of the Modocs, and their neighbors the Klamaths, began settling in the area. Ethnologists believe the Modocs and Klamaths were originally one people, but probably around the time of the American Revolution, the tribe split into two factions. The range of Modocs and Klamaths proved extensive, with the Modocs stretching five thousand square miles. Jeff Riddle, whose mother was a Modoc, described the Modocs home: