If ever there was a poster child for the phrase
“money can’t buy happiness,” it was Consuelo Vanderbilt.
Born into the Vanderbilt fortune in 1877, Consuelo
grew up surrounded by mansions, servants, and more money than most people could
spend in ten lifetimes. She was beautiful, wealthy, and famous before she was
old enough to vote. Society reporters followed her around like paparazzi.
Sounds great, right?
Not exactly.
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| 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.”
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
