The Story Of The Outlaw - free ebook by Emerson Hough

EMERSON HOUGH

NEW YORK THE OUTING PUBLISHING COMPANY 1907 Copyright, 1905, by THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY Copyright, 1907, by EMERSON HOUGH Entered at Stationers' Hall, London, England All Rights Reserved THE OUTING PRESS DEPOSIT, N. Y....

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PREFACE

In offering this study of the American desperado, the author constitutes himself no apologist for the acts of any desperado; yet neither does he feel that apology is needed for the theme itself. The outlaw, the desperado—that somewhat distinct and easily recognizable figure generally known in the West as the "bad man"—is a character unique in our national history, and one whose like scarcely has been produced in any land other than this. It is not necessary to promote absurd and melodramatic imp

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Chapter I

The Desperado— Analysis of His Make-up — How the Desperado Got to Be Bad and Why — Some Men Naturally Skillful with Weapons — Typical Desperadoes . Energy and action may be of two sorts, good or bad; this being as well as we can phrase it in human affairs. The live wires that net our streets are more dangerous than all the bad men the country ever knew, but we call electricity on the whole good in its action. We lay it under law, but sometimes it breaks out and has its own way. These outbreaks w

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Chapter II

The Imitation Desperado— The Cheap "Long-Hair" — A Desperado in Appearance, a Coward at Heart — Some Desperadoes Who Did Not "Stand the Acid." The counterfeit bad man, in so far as he has a place in literature, was largely produced by Western consumptives for Eastern consumption. Sometimes he was in person manufactured in the East and sent West. It is easy to see the philosophical difference between the actual bad man of the West and the imitation article. The bad man was an evolution; the imita

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Chapter III

The Land of the Desperado— The Frontier of the Old West — The Great Unsettled Regions — The Desperado of the Mountains — His Brother of the Plains — The Desperado of the Early Railroad Towns . There was once a vast empire, almost unknown, west of the Missouri river. The white civilization of this continent was three hundred years in reaching it. We had won our independence and taken our place among the nations of the world before our hardiest men had learned anything whatever of this Western emp

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Chapter IV

The Early Outlaw— The Frontier of the Past Century — The Bad Man East of the Mississippi River — The Great Western Land-Pirate, John A. Murrell — The Greatest Slave Insurrection Ever Planned . Before passing to the review of the more modern days of wild life on the Western frontier, we shall find it interesting to note a period less known, but quite as wild and desperate as any of later times. Indeed, we might also say that our own desperadoes could take lessons from their ancestors of the past

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Chapter V

The Vigilantes of California— The Greatest Vigilante Movement of the World — History of the California "Stranglers" and Their Methods . The world will never see another California. Great gold stampedes there may be, but under conditions far different from those of 1849. Transportation has been so developed, travel has become so swift and easy, that no section can now long remain segregated from the rest of the world. There is no corner of the earth which may not now be reached with a celerity im

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Chapter VI

The Outlaw of the Mountains— The Gold Stampedes of the '60's — Armed Bandits of the Mountain Mining Camps . The greatest of American gold stampedes, and perhaps the greatest of the world, not even excepting that of Australia, was that following upon the discovery of gold in California. For twenty years all the West was mad for gold. No other way would serve but the digging of wealth directly from the soil. Agriculture was too slow, commerce too tame, to satisfy the bold population of the frontie

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Chapter VII

Henry Plummer— A Northern Bad Man — The Head of the Robber Band in the Montana Mining Country — A Man of Brains and Ability, but a Cold-Blooded Murderer . Henry Plummer was for several years in the early '60's the "chief" of the widely extended band of robbers and murderers who kept the placer-mining fields of Montana and Idaho in a state of terror. Posing part of the time as an officer of the law, he was all the time the leader in the reign of lawlessness. He was always ready for combat, and he

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Chapter VIII

Boone Helm— A Murderer, Cannibal, and Robber — A Typical Specimen of Absolute Human Depravity . Henry Plummer was what might be called a good instance of the gentleman desperado, if such a thing be possible; a man of at least a certain amount of refinement, and certainly one who, under different surroundings, might have led a different life. For the sake of contrast, if for nothing else, we may take the case of Boone Helm, one of Plummer's gang, who was the opposite of Plummer in every way excep

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Chapter IX

Death Scenes of Desperadoes— How Bad Men Died — The Last Moments of Desperadoes Who Finished on the Scaffold — Utterances of Terror, of Defiance, and of Cowardice . There is always a grim sort of curiosity regarding the way in which notoriously desperate men meet their end; and perhaps this is as natural as is the curiosity regarding the manner in which they lived. "Did he die game?" is one of the questions asked by bad men among themselves. "Did he die with his boots on?" is another. The last w

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Chapter X

Joseph A. Slade— A Man with a Newspaper Reputation — Bad, but Not as Bad as Painted — Hero of the Overland Express Route — A Product of Courage Plus Whiskey, and the End of the Product . One of the best-known desperadoes the West ever produced was Joseph A. Slade, agent of the Overland stage line on the central or mountain division, about 1860, and hence in charge of large responsibilities in a strip of country more than six hundred miles in extent, which possessed all the ingredients for troubl

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Chapter XI

The Desperado of the Plains— Lawlessness Founded on Loose Methods — The Rustlers of the Cow Country — Excuses for Their Acts — The Approach of the Commercial West . One pronounced feature of early Western life will have been remarked in the story of the mountain settlements with which we have been concerned, and that is the transient and migratory character of the population. It is astonishing what distances were traveled by the bold men who followed the mining stampedes all over the wilderness

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Chapter XII

Wild Bill Hickok— The Beau Ideal of the Western Bad Man; Chivalric, Daring, Generous, and Game — A Type of the Early Western Frontier Officer . As has been shown in preceding chapters, the Western plains were passed over and left unsettled until the advent of the railroads, which began to cross the plains coincident with the arrival of the great cattle herds which came up from the South after a market. This market did not wait for the completion of the railroads, but met the railroads more than

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Chapter XIII

Frontier Wars— Armed Conflicts of Bodies of Men on the Frontiers — Political Wars; Town Site Wars; Cattle Wars — Factional Fights . The history of the border wars on the American frontier, where the fighting was more like battle than murder, and where the extent of the crimes against law became too large for the law ever to undertake any settlement, would make a long series of bloody volumes. These wars of the frontier were sometimes political, as the Kansas anti-slavery warfare; or, again, they

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Chapter XIV

The Lincoln County War— The Bloodiest, Most Dramatic and Most Romantic of all the Border Wars — First Authentic Story Ever Printed of the Bitterest Feud of the Southwest . The entire history of the American frontier is one of rebellion against the law, if, indeed, that may be called rebellion whose apostles have not yet recognized any authority of the law. The frontier antedated anarchy. It broke no social compact, for it had never made one. Its population asked no protection save that afforded

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Chapter XV

The Stevens County War— The Bloodiest County Seat War of the West — The Personal Narrative of a Man Who Was Shot and Left for Dead — The Most Expensive United States Court Case Ever Tried . In the month of May, 1886, the writer was one of a party of buffalo-hunters bound for the Neutral Strip and the Panhandle of Texas, where a small number of buffalo still remained at that time. We traveled across the entire southwestern part of Kansas, below the Santa Fé railroad, at a time when the great land

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Chapter XVI

Biographies of Bad Men— Desperadoes of the Deserts — Billy the Kid, Jesse Evans, Joel Fowler, and Others Skilled in the Art of Gun Fighting . The desert regions of the West seemed always to breed truculence and touchiness. Some of the most desperate outlaws have been those of western Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. These have sometimes been Mexicans, sometimes half-breed Indians, very rarely full-blood or half-blood negroes. The latter race breeds criminals, but lacks in the initiative required

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Chapter XVII

The Fight of Buckshot Roberts— Encounter Between a Crippled Ex-Soldier and the Band of Billy the Kid — One Man Against Thirteen. Next to the fight of Wild Bill with the McCandlas gang, the fight of Buckshot Roberts at Blazer's Mill, on the Mescalero Indian reservation, is perhaps the most remarkable combat of one man against odds ever known in the West. The latter affair is little known, but deserves its record. Buckshot Roberts was one of those men who appeared on the frontier and gave little h

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Chapter XVIII

The Man Hunt— The Western Peace Officer, a Quiet Citizen Who Works for a Salary and Risks His Life — The Trade of Man Hunting — Biography of Pat Garrett, a Typical Frontier Sheriff . The deeds of the Western sheriff have for the most part gone unchronicled, or have luridly been set forth in fiction as incidents of blood, interesting only because of their bloodiness. The frontier officer himself, usually not a man to boast of his own acts, has quietly stepped into the background of the past, and

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Chapter XIX

Bad Men of Texas— The Lone Star State Always a Producer of Fighters — A Long History of Border War — The Death of Ben Thompson . A review of the story of the American desperado will show that he has always been most numerous at the edge of things, where there was a frontier, a debatable ground between civilization and lawlessness, or a border between opposing nations or sections. He does not wholly pass away with the coming of the law, but his home is essentially in a new and undeveloped conditi

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Chapter XX

Modern Bad Men— Murder and Robbery as a Profession — The School of Guerrilla Warfare — Butcher Quantrell; the James Brothers; the Younger Brothers . Outlawry of the early border, in days before any pretense at establishment of a system of law and government, and before the holding of property had assumed any very stable form, may have retained a certain glamour of romance. The loose gold of the mountains, the loose cattle of the plains, before society had fallen into any strict way of living, an

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Chapter XXI

Bad Men of the Indian Nations— A Hotbed of Desperadoes — Reasons for Bad Men in the Indian Nations — The Dalton Boys — The Most Desperate Street Fight of the West . What is true for Texas, in the record of desperadoism, is equally applicable to the country adjoining Texas upon the north, long known under the general title of the Indian Nations; although it is now rapidly being divided and allotted under the increasing demands of an ever-advancing civilization. The great breeding ground of outlaw

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