Gunfighter Clay Allison

 

Clay Allison amused himself shooting up small towns and dancehalls, and 
making gentlemen dance barefoot to the accompaniement of his bullets

Clay Allison’s “trigger finger was the busiest in the early 80s,” wrote the Albuquerque Morning Journal. “His record was twenty-one dead men, whose graves were scattered from Dodge City to Santa Fe.”

The article said, “Clay spent his time amusing himself shooting up small towns and dance halls, and making gentlemen dance barefoot to the accompaniment of his bullets.”

One of Allison’s first kills was a desperado named Chunk. They met up at Red River Station in New Mexico on January 7, 1874. Chunk was out to get Allison because Clay had killed his uncle.

The two men sat on opposite sides of the dinner table, each man itching for an opportunity to draw. Chunk made the first move. He dropped his knife on the floor and reached below the table to grab it. Allison didn’t miss a beat—he pulled his pistol and let Chunk have it—right between the eyes. The Evening Star said, “A little red spot between Chunk’s eye showed where the bullet had entered, and the man, swaying from side to side, bent gradually over and soon was perfectly still, with his face buried in the dish.”

Doc Holliday: Frontier Gambler, Gunfighter, And Sometimes Lawman

 

Doc Holliday

Bat Masterson spoke admiringly about most of the big-name gunfighters of the Old West, but he had a particularly low opinion of Doc Holliday. “I never liked him, and few persons did. He had a mean disposition and differed from most of the big gunfighters in that he would seek a fight...He had few friends anywhere in the West.” Virgil Earp told the Arizona Daily Star, “There was something peculiar about Doc...outside of us boys. I don’t think he had a friend in the territory.”

Although Masterson didn’t come right out and call Holliday a coward, he said, unlike Wild Bill and Wyatt Earp, who were as good with their fists as they were with their pistols, Doc Holliday was a “physical weakling.” His opinion was that a fifteen-year-old could make easy work of him in a “go-as-you-please fistfight.” But as soon as you put a gun in his hand, danger transformed Doc Holliday from a 98-pound weakling into a raging madman.

Like most legendary figures of the Old West, so much of what’s been written about Doc Holliday is contradictory at best. In the Encyclopedia of Western Gunfighters (1942), Bill O’Neal credits Doc with just two kills in eight gunfights, far from the dozens of kills and near kills most biographers attribute to him.

Doc Holliday was like a fish out of water in Dodge City and Tombstone. He was a dentist by profession, but a gambler and a gunfighter by choice.

Gunfighter John Wesley Hardin

 

John Wesley Hardin was so mean that he once shot a man just for snoring

John Wesley Hardin was a mean, ornery, old cuss. The story is that he once shot a man just for snoring.

An article published in The Times (Washington, DC) said Hardin was staying at a hotel in Nogales. “He was annoyed by a heavy snorer in the next room. Without making an effort to caution the sleeper, he put his ear to the thin board partition until he got the exact position of his snoring neighbor’s head. Then he fired one .45 caliber bullet through the wall. The snoring stopped. The corpse was found the next morning, shot through the brain.”

In later years Hardin said, “They tell lots of lies about me. They say I killed five or six men for snoring. Well, it ain’t true! I only killed one man for snoring.”

Talk about a mean son-of-a-bitch.

Hardin’s autobiography, published shortly after his death, contains a laundry list of murders committed by the gunfighter. He took credit for killing 42 men. A more accurate number is thought to be somewhere between 20 and 25.

His first “near murder” happened at school when he was 14. Another student, Charles Sloter, accused Hardin of writing “doggerel” on the blackboard about a girl named Sal. Then he grabbed a seat next to Hardin, slugged him in the shoulder, and pulled out a knife. Sloter quickly learned he picked the wrong kid to mess with. Hardin “stabbed him twice, almost fatally in the breast.” There was talk about locking him up or hanging him. Eventually, Hardin got off, but trouble seemed to follow the teen.

Luke Short: Frontier Scout, Gambler, and Gunfighter

 

Luke Short stuck the muzzle of his pistol against Charlie Storm's heart and
pulled the trigger. He pulled the trigger again, and Storms fell to the ground.

“Luke Short was a little fellow, so to speak,” said Bat Masterson. He was “about five feet six inches in height, and weighing in the neighborhood of one hundred and forty pounds.” And he was nothing more than “a white Indian.”

The Omaha Daily Bee said Short was a scout for General Crook’s cavalry in 1876 and 1877 during his Black Hills campaign. He was chased by fifteen Sioux on one mission and single-handedly killed five of them while escaping. As the Indians chased him, “Short returned their fire and dropped the three foremost in quick succession with as many bullets.” Two Indians raced after him. “Deliberately checking his horse’s pace, Short turned in his saddle and dropped the two Indians one after the other.”

That was the beginning of his legend.

In 1878, he killed two noted horse thieves over a game of Spanish Monte. After they lost all their money to Short, the gamblers demanded Short give it back. When he refused, they pulled their guns. “Short was too quick for them,” reported the Omaha Daily Bee. Both men dropped to the ground—dead, without a chance to pull the trigger.

On Friday, February 21, 1881, Luke Short got into a gunfight at the Oriental Saloon in Tombstone, Arizona.

Billy the Kid, New Mexico Outlaw

 

In his history of Billy the Kid, Charles Siringo portrayed Billy 
as a crazed psycho-killer who made his first kill at age 12

In his History of Billy the Kid, Charles Siringo portrayed Billy as a crazed psycho-killer who made his first kill at age twelve. Then, Billy snuck off to Fort Union, New Mexico, where he gambled with the black soldiers. A “black nigger” cheated him, and he shot the man dead. Not long after that, he stabbed a man three times in a saloon fight and ran out of the establishment with blood dripping from his right hand.

Siringo blamed it on Billy’s violent temper. However, Sheriff Pat Garrett, who would eventually track Billy down and kill him, said just the opposite. Garrett said people often talked about the look in Billy’s eye and his temper just before he killed, but the Kid wasn’t like that. Garrett said, Billy ate “and laughed, drank and laughed, talked and laughed, fought and laughed and killed and laughed.”

The only picture we have of Billy the Kid doesn’t do him justice. He looks more like a mental defective with a lopsided face than someone often described as a lady’s man. Billy stood five feet eight inches tall, weighed about 140 pounds, and had a stringy, muscular build. His hair was a sandy brownish-blond, and the one personality trait that stuck out about the Kid was his sense of humor.

In other circumstances, he might have been a politician or a business mogul, but he was a gunman in the Old West and one of the best at his trade.

Evett Dumas Nix and the War on the Doolin-Dalton Gang

 

Evett Dumas Nix

When Evett Dumas Nix became U.S. Marshal of Oklahoma Territory in 1893, deputy marshals were still trying to bring outlaws in alive.

 

That policy nearly got them wiped out.

 

On September 1, 1893, deputy marshals rode into Ingalls looking for members of the Doolin-Dalton Gang. Instead, they found a minor war waiting for them.

 

The fight shocked Oklahoma Territory.

 

Judge Frank Dale told the marshals, “Bring them in dead—quit trying to bring them in as prisoners.”

 

Whether those were his exact words hardly mattered. The message was clear enough.

 

The old rules were finished.

 

For years, deputy marshals had been going after outlaws, as Nix later put it, “Kentucky style.” If a man surrendered, he got his day in court. If he wanted to fight, the marshals fought back. There was still an effort to take prisoners.

Western Lawman Bill Tilghman

 

Bill Tighman

Bill Tilghman got his start as a buffalo hunter in the early 1870s. Along with his partner, George Rust, Tilghman signed on with the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad in 1872—promising to bring in 50 buffalo a week to feed their construction crews. By the time Tilghman left the line in 1875, the two men had taken down close to 12,000 buffalo.

After that, Tilghman tried his luck at a string of jobs—ranching, running a saloon in Dodge City, Kansas, and serving as a deputy for Bat Masterson in Ford County, Kansas. Not too long after that, there was some talk that Bill took part in a train robbery and stole some horses—but none of it stuck. From 1883 to 1886, Tilghman served as a deputy for Pat Sughrue in Dodge City.

In 1889, at the start of the Oklahoma land boom, he staked a claim near Guthrie, Oklahoma, and took up ranching. A few years later, in 1893, Tilghman was appointed city marshal of Perry, Oklahoma. Heck Thomas was his assistant marshal. Together, they cleaned up the town.

The Wichita Daily Eagle ran a story about Tilghman that year, describing him as “tall and slim, straight as an arrow, and is not afraid of anything living. He never gets excited, talks but little, and in the performance of his duties does not seem to know the meaning of the word failure.” The implication was, once he started a case, Tilghman would not give up until he got his man.

His wife, Zoe Tilghman, published an article in Life Magazine on May 18, 1959. She said the movie gave a false impression of western lawmen. They “hated to kill and never boasted about it.” It was just something they needed to do to clean up the frontier to make it safe for families to move in.