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| Tom Ketchum was the second Black Jack to terrorize the Arizon Territory |
Tom Ketchum was the second Black Jack to terrorize the Arizona Territory.
The first was a fellow by the name of Worthington. Lawman Les Dowe said they
were the “very image” of each other. Dowe said
Ketchum was “an absolutely dead shot with
rifle or revolver. His nerve was past all question.”
Tom
Ketchum hooked up with his first partner in crime, Tom Sanders, while working
for the Chiricahua Cattle Company in the Sulphur Springs Valley on the western
slope of the Chiricahua Mountains. The pay was a hundred dollars a month, and
to earn it, a man needed to be “as handy with a gun as with a rope or a
branding iron.”
Tom
Sanders was a real badass. Tom and his
brother Charlie got shot up by a posse in
Montana. They were captured, handcuffed together, and then escaped. His brother, Charlie, took a bullet and was killed in the shootout. Tom had
no way out except to cut off his dead brother’s hand.
Ketchum
and Sanders began their robbery streak around Sonora, Mexico, in 1891. They
moved from town-to-town, robbing stores and anyplace else that looked like it
might score them a few bucks. That got the locals riled up, and they soon found
themselves racing out of town with a dozen Rurales hot on their ass, chasing
them high into the mountains. The boys killed five of the Rurales in the
fighting that day.
Not
long after that, Ketchum formed an outlaw band with Billy Carver, Tom Sanders,
Bronco Bill, and Ezra Lay. They called themselves the High-Five Gang and
operated throughout Texas and New Mexico. They robbed their first train at
Stein’s Pass in northern Arizona. Unfortunately, that one went sour from the
start. The gang intended to rob the Wells Fargo express car but instead cut off the mail car. The take was nowhere near
what they expected.
They
robbed another train in Stein’s Pass in 1895. Not long after this, they formed the Black Jack Gang, adding
Sam Ketchum (Tom’s brother), Harry Longbow, Gus Cassidy, Ben Kilpatrick, Jimmy
Low, and Harvey Logan.
The Black jack Gang pulling a train robbery
In 1897, they robbed an express train headed to Helena, Montana, and netted a cool $100,000 in banknotes. The only problem was that the notes weren’t signed, so the boys had to turn into forgers before spending their booty.
Bad
luck seemed to dog Black Jack’s gang. Harvey Logan was captured not long after
the Helena robbery. Tom Sanders disappeared after the second robbery at Stein’s
Pass. No one was sure whether he had been killed
or decided it was time to move on.
The
gang’s next job was a train robbery in Folsom, New Mexico. In no time at all, a
posse was hot on their trail. The boys were resting up in the Cimarron country when Ezra Lay got up to get some water.
That’s when all hell busted loose. Sheriff Farr’s posse had worked their way in
behind the gang and opened fire from
behind a clump of rocks and trees. Ezra Lay was the first outlaw to go down. He
was shot in the back and lay there
swearing and mad. The boys probably would have laughed at his predicament if it
wasn’t for all the lead flying over their heads. Sam Ketchum fared little
better. He took a bullet in the arm that led to his eventual undoing.
In
the end, the posse got the worst of it. Sheriff Farr
and all his men got shot up and killed.
The lone survivor was a newspaper reporter who tagged along with the posse. The
outlaws let him live, but only because
he’d hidden away during the fighting and had been too scared to fire a shot at
them.
After
that fiasco, the gang split up into small
groups to make their getaway.
Black Jack and the Cimmaron shootout
Sam Ketchum got himself captured and cashed in his chips in prison. Billy Carver, Ben Kilpatrick, Gus Cassidy, and Harry Longbow got together to rob a bank in Sonora. Unfortunately, some locals recognized several of the boys during a scouting trip into the town. Billy Carver was shot at least six times and killed. Ben Kilpatrick got shot in the head and was never right again. He turned into a “driveling lunatic” and spent the rest of his days wandering throughout Texas.
In
1899, Black Jack rushed off on a fool’s errand. He got it into his head to rob
a train all on his own in Roswell, New Mexico. He flagged the train down and forced the engineer to bring it to a
complete stop. Then he had the engineer and fireman uncouple the express car
and move it away from the train.
Things
went downhill fast. Conductor Harrington, who’d been robbed twice before by
Black Jack’s gang, decided he’d had enough. He grabbed a sawed-off shotgun and
snuck up behind Black Jack. As soon as he had a clear shot, Harrington let loose
and fired a charge of buckshot into Black Jack’s arm and side. Harrington
didn’t bother to check whether Black Jack was dead or alive. After he saw the
bandit go down, he signaled the engineer
to get a move on, and the train hightailed it out of there.
Black
Jack made his way to his horse but couldn’t stay on his mount. He fell off his
horse and spent the night in the rocks by the side of the track. He signaled a
passing train the next day and hitched a ride into Trinidad, New Mexico. After
the doctor amputated his arm, the sheriff hauled him off to the hoosegow.
At
his trial, Black Jack told Harrington, “You’ve done me up. They’re going to
hang me.” There was no escaping it. New Mexico didn’t look kindly upon train
robbers. So Ketchum was sentenced to hang
and locked away in the penitentiary at Santa Fe to await his fate.
The
execution occurred at Clayton, Union County, New Mexico, on April 26, 1901.
Like everything else in Black Jack’s career, his hanging wound up a hot mess.
He
was brave enough.
On
the gallows, Black Jack stopped to offer some advice to aspiring robbers.
“Never steal cattle or horses, but stick to banks
and trains and, whenever anybody interferes, shoot to kill, and a lot of bother
would be saved.” Before the hangman
finished him off, Ketchum got in one last jab. He told his executioners, “I’ll
be in hell before you start breakfast, boys. Let her rip!”
And
let her rip, they did.
One
hundred fifty spectators crowded around as Sheriff Salom Garcia chopped the
rope twice with his hatchet. When the trapdoor swung open, the crowd heard a
nasty pop as Ketchum’s head tore from his
body. The doctor stitched the head back onto the body before laying him to rest
in Clayton’s Boot Hill cemetery.
Black Jack Ketchum on the gallows
An article published in the Topeka State Journal on April 26, 1901, said, “The rope broke, but the fall jerked his head off.” The San Francisco Chronicle, dated April 27, 1901, was more graphic, saying, “When the body dropped through the trap, the half-inch rope severed the head as cleanly as if a knife had cut it. The body pitched forward, with blood spurting from the headless trunk. The head remained in the black sack and flew down into the pit...for a few seconds. The body was allowed to lie there, half doubled up on its right side, with the blood issuing in an intermittent pattern from the severed neck.”
That’s
how Black Jack Ketchum met his end.
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