Historical Summary

IN TRAINING men to kill, the Civil War, like other military conflicts, produced the professional killer. Beginning with the struggle over the Free Soil issue, bloody warfare prevailed in Missouri and Kansas. Joining the Confederate guerillas to retaliate against harsh treatment at the hands of the Union militia, a youngster named Jesse James suffered outlawry, but continued an unabated reign of crime. With Jim Lane’s Red Legs on the free state side fought Wild Bill Hickok. In the second incident reported below, George Ward Nichols told the readers of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (February, 1867) the inside story of the sensational McCanless massacre, when Wild Bill, a one-man Union army, killed ten enemy gangsters. Naturally, Wild Bill was acquitted. The "prince of pistoleers" was very anxious that Nichols should get word to his old mother that he was not "a cutthroat and vagabond" and that he was a loyal Union adherent. "I have told his story precisely as it was told to me," Nichols declared, "confirmed in all important points by many witnesses; and I have no doubt of its truth." Apparently the publicity from it must have backfired, because Wild Bill later hedged on some of the details.

In the days when the six-shooter was the law of the land, it was kill or be killed. "The most of the men I have killed," confessed Wild Bill, "it was one or t’other of us, and at such times, you don’t stop to think; and what’s the use after it’s all over?" The McCanless massacre was later topped by Wild Bill when he simultaneously killed two assailants who had entered by opposite doors of a restaurant. A flashy stunt done with mirrors.

The mining and cattle-rustling days produced the notorious cold-blooded killer of the type of Billy the Kid, the most famous desperado of the Southwest, but recently deflated by Burton Rascoe as a "nondescript, adenoidal, weasel-eyed, narrow-chested, stoop-shouldered, repulsive-looking creature with all the outward appearance of a cretin." His career of murder was prematurely terminated at the tender age of twenty-one. The gangster Slade was cut to the same pattern. He was one of Plummer’s band of outlaws, ironically called "The Innocents," who terrorized the mining towns of Nevada and Montana. In Roughin’ It (third excerpt) Mark Twain found him astonishingly courteous. But then, luckily for Mark, Slade just happened to he sober. When drunk, he was a "fiend incarnate."

"The true desperado," commented Mark Twain, "is gifted with splendid courage, and yet he will take the most infamous advantage of his enemy. Armed and free, he will stand up before a host and fight until he is shot all to pieces, and yet when he is under the gallows and helpless he will cry and plead like a child." The western cutthroat, like the twentieth-century gangster, proved to be a "yellow rat." Thomas J. Dimsdale, in his authentic account of The Vigilantes of Montana, reports that, when the Vigilantes moved against Plummer’s gang in 1864, they finally caught up with Slade. Six hundred miners marched into Virginia City and prepared to underwrite his execution. On the gallows Slade exhausted himself with tears, prayers, and lamentations, repeatedly exclaiming:

"My God! My God! Must I die? Oh, my clear wife!"

But the command was inexorably given: "Men, do your duty!" The box slipped from beneath his feet and he died almost instantaneously.

The careers of the killers served to underscore the report of the humorist, Artemus Ward, who, on a visit to the territorial prison in Carson City, Nevada, was told by the warden:

"This man’s crime was horse-stealing. He is here for life. This man is in for murder. He is here for three years."

For a time life was cheap on the frontier. Roy Bean, who for years held court in the "Jersey Lily" saloon, dealt out summary justice to cattle rustlers in accordance with the "law west of the Pecos." On the other hand, a prisoner charged with slaying a Chinese was dismissed on the ground that "he’d be damned if he could find any law against killing a Chinaman."

Key Quote

How "Wild Bill" Hickok killed ten gangsters with seven bullets.