The Petticoat Terror of the Old West

28. June 2013 · 2 comments · Categories: Old West · Tags: , , ,

Her proper given name was Myra Maybelle Shirley, later shortened to Belle, and she had a lamentable taste for dangerous men and walking on the far side of the law, which eventually brought her to an untimely grave, murdered by the last in that series of dangerous men. Her career brought considerable embarrassment to an otherwise respectable and law-abiding family, who resided near Carthage, Missouri in the year of her birth, 1848. Her father was a Virginian, a prosperous man, a pillar of the community, and a judge – and she was the only daughter in a family of boys. Her father the judge had her expensively schooled in those arts thought proper for a Victorian-era lady of good family at at the local female seminary, where she excelled in French and in playing the piano. Her older brother Bud, more problematically taught her to ride, to shoot, curse like a trooper and love the out-of-doors. A show-off and a bit of a tomboy – how could an independent and spirited girl with five indulgent brothers be anything else?

Alas, the prosperity of the Shirley family took a hit in the period leading up to and during the Civil War, Guerrilla warfare between pro- and anti-slavery sympathizers in Kansas and Missouri spiraled into a vicious partisan war. Kansas bled and Missouri hemorrhaged … and the Shirley family was not spared. Bud Shirley joined William Clark Quantrill’s band at the start of the war, and was killed in a skirmish in the last year. Some versions have it that Myra Maybelle was a spy for Quantrill, or one of his lovers, others that she strapped on a pair of revolvers and took her own revenge for Bud’s death. Such tales are unlikely in the extreme; she would have been a school girl barely into her teens and under the authority of per parents. While her father may have been indulgent – he wouldn’t have been that indulgent. In any case, when Carthage was burned by Confederate guerrillas late in 1863, Judge Shirley had enough. He moved his surviving family to Texas, to a farm in a little town which is now a suburb of Dallas.

A little more than a year after the war ended, several members of the James-Younger gang showed up seeking refuge after pulling off a profitable bank robbery in Liberty, Missouri. The older James and Youngers were comrades of Bud Shirley’s in Quantrill’s band; likely it was not a coincidence they turned up asking hospitality from the family of a comrade, on the grounds that they were still fighting the good fight against the hated Yankee victors. Myra Maybelle was eighteen by then – and she fell heavily for Cole Younger … although possible with equal ardor for another Quantrill veteran from Missouri, one James Reed. In any case, she married James Reed the following year, supposedly running away to the woods and being married there – shades of Robin Hood and Maid Marian. It is a matter of conjecture if her family approved this or any of her subsequent nuptials. If they had objections, they kept them to themselves, being by this time unable to turn their wayward daughter from her chosen course. Perhaps they simply hoped that she was entering into a secure, respectable married life and giving up an unseemly affection for horses, guns and dangerous scoundrels. James Reed – with his own lawless reputation not yet established – must have appeared as much more promising husband material than Cole Younger, who was already wanted across several mid-western states.  And Myra Maybelle was well-bred, well-schooled, and existing photographs taken of her in the bloom of youth confirm that she was not unfortunate in looks. Later she did look like a couple of miles of bad road. Possibly in compensation, she developed a taste for flamboyant hats and was usually seen wearing a black-velvet riding habit in the latest style.

For a number of months and possibly years, James Reed managed the straight and narrow with regard to law and order. Myra Maybelle bore two children to him, although rumors persisted that the older of them was actually fathered by Cole Younger. Unfortunately, it turned out that James Reed’s family back in Missouri had a thriving side-line in horse thievery. A rival family ambushed and killed James Reed’s brother – and in the manner of Old West vendettas, James retaliated. He and Myra Maybelle fled the resulting murder warrants … all the way to California, which afforded a safe refuge, until the local constabulary discovered the warrants … and there was a little matter of a stagecoach robbery near San Diego. The Reeds returned to Texas, Myra Maybelle to her long-suffering family, and James to Oklahoma … to a refuge in a remote hide-out in the Cherokee part of Indian Territory.

This was a small settlement on the Canadian River between Briartown and Eufala, the home of Tom Starr and his extended clan of sons, daughters, cousins, in-laws … and outlaws. Tom Starr had been such a violent partisan of the Confederate faction of the Cherokees that at the end of the war he was essentially bribed into behaving himself. Myra Maybelle visited often to see her husband – where she would have met Tom Starr’s son Sam – or James traveled to Scyene to see her. But by 1873, she had dispatched the children to relatives and was running a livery stable in Dallas … a stable which also served the essential function as a front for disposing of stolen horses. Contra popular movies and television, horse thievery was a profitable business, and not one in ten of professional thieves were ever caught. Myra Maybelle was perfectly situated: Dallas was a thriving boom-town, the center of trade and commerce in cattle and cotton, on the intersection of two major railways. She was intelligent and literate, in the ideal location to plan crimes, fence the stolen horses, and to ensure that those of her associates unwary or unlucky enough to be caught were defended against legal charges. She was literate, and intelligent – and in a perfect location to both plan crimes, to fence the stolen property afterwards, and to see that those of her associates unwary – or unlucky – enough to be caught were defended against the charges, one way or another. But was she really the ‘bandit queen’, the brains behind a motley gang of thieves of every description – or merely a thrill-seeker and enabler of violent men? Alas, the facts are in considerable dispute among historians and folklorists, since they were obscured by the interests of sensational newspaper stories and dime novels about the wild, wild west – a process which had Myra Maybelle’s enthusiastic cooperation.

On one of his conjugal visits to Dallas, James Reed joined some of his good bad friends and robbed the San Antonio to Austin stage – but didn’t get to enjoy his share of the loot for long, as he was subsequently shot and killed by a local deputy sheriff. When Myra Maybelle was called to ID the remains (there was a substantial reward in the offing for James Reed, dead or alive) she supposedly claimed the deputy had killed the wrong man – leaving the lawman unrewarded.

Around 1880, Myra Maybelle married Sam Starr, and gained the surname by which she is best known – Belle Starr. The reconstructed family settled in a small house overlooking the Canadian River, which property she named Younger’s Bend, and she gave an interview to a Dallas newspaper in the mid-1880s claiming that she was the model of upright propriety, and there was no woman in the world more peaceably inclined than herself … but alas, the cozy house at Younger’s Bend was the center for an active bandit gang – just one of many in Indian Territory, the last outpost of the lawless wild west. She and the hubby-of-the-moment were charged with stealing horses, and brought before the great Judge Parker in Fort Smith. The pair were found guilty and sentenced to a year in prison. Belle Starr improved the idle hours of confinement by writing a memoir of her life and tutoring the warden’s children in music and French. She and Sam returned to Younger’s Bend on release … where, after another accusation of armed robbery, Sam Starr was killed in a blazing gun battle with a local deputy with whom he had tangled before.

Her final husband was a Creek Indian, who moved into the Younger’s Bend house. Jim July was handsome, educated, half her age and – like many of her amorous and professional associates – a professional horse thief. Early in February, 1889, he departed for Fort Smith, to answer the latest round of criminal charges against him. Belle rode along with him for a short distance, before returning to Younger’s Bend. She stopped to visit a neighbor’s wife and while there, another neighbor stopped by. This neighbor wanted to lease a portion of her property. She had so far refused to do so, and the neighbor was irate. His name was E. A. Watson; local rumor had it that he was wanted in Florida for murder. In the course of the argument, Watson remarked slightingly about the frequency with which officers of the law came to visit Younger’s Bend in the course of their professional duties. Stung, Belle Starr shot back, “Maybe the officers in Florida would like to know where to find you?” and made an angry departure.

Everyone assumed this meant Watson was certain-sure that she was going to inform on him. He is assumed to have gone home, armed himself with a shotgun, and waited for Belle Star to ride past.  A little way up the trail, two men waiting for a crude ferry to cross the Canadian River heard two shots and saw Belle Starr’s riderless horse run down the bank and swim across the river. When they back-tracked, they found her body lying in the trail. She had been shot in in the back, thrown from her horse, and then the murderer had made sure with second load of turkey shot as she lay on the ground.   Jim July came riding hell-for-leather back from Fort Smith as soon as he heard the news about his wife. His suspicions immediately focused on Watson, who furiously insisted that he was not guilty, although his shotgun was found to have both barrels fired recently and a set of footprints similar to his own had been found, leading from his house to the place where Belle Star had been ambushed, and back to his house again. Watson submitted to being arrested by July, and all parties concerned – the witnesses and Belle’s daughter Pearl trooped off to Fort Smith to testify in the matter. Several curious things; the footprints were only circumstantial evidence, so was the recently-used shotgun.  Watson had a good repute among his neighbors, as hard-working and well-liked … and he wasn’t a wanted man, which removed a motivation for murder. He was ordered to be released.

Almost immediately, Jim July skipped out on the original charge … and a deputy marshal who probed a little farther into the murder talked with Watson upon his release. It seemed that Jim July had come to borrow his shotgun on the very day he had departed, claiming that he needed to kill a wolf. When he returned it, an hour later, both barrels had been fired. Watson was certain that July had attempted to frame him. Judge Parker authorized further investigation. It also emerged that one of the neighbors – one of the witnesses who had seen Belle Starr’s horse and discovered the body – had been offered $200 to kill Belle … by her husband. The man had refused immediately, and Jim July had replied, “Hell – I’ll kill the old hag myself and spend the money for whiskey!”  When neighbor was asked why July would want to kill his own wife, he explained that July had gotten involved with another woman, and Bell was furious. She would do nothing to help him fight the current charges against him. That provided motivation for the murder. A year later the fugitive Jim July was arrested after a gunfight in Ardmore with the arresting deputies, but died before he could confess anything. Belle Starr’s daughter Pearl had her buried at Younger’s Bend, under a tombstone ornamented with the images of a bell, a star, a hand holding a bunch of flowers, Belle’s favorite horse and the verse, “Shed not for her the bitter tear, Nor give the heart to vain regret; ‘Tis but the casket that lies here, The gem that filled it sparkles yet.”

(These people do not appear in my next book, although the time period and location overlap slightly. I do have a cattle-rustling gang based in Indian Territory as an element, which is loosely based on some of the large organized gangs which thrived there. And John Wesley Hardin wanders in, and out on two occasions. The Quivera Trail will be out in November, 2013. )

Jack Hays’ Big Fight

21. June 2013 · Comments Off on Jack Hays’ Big Fight · Categories: Old West · Tags:

Jack HaysJack Hays holds an outsized place in the history of the Texas Rangers, who began as a sort of heavily-armed and mounted Neighborhood Watch, metamorphosed into frontier protection force, and only much, much later into a law-enforcement body. But he was one of the earliest Ranger commanders; a  surveyor by profession, born in Tennessee and raised in Mississippi, who would live to a ripe old age as a politician and lawman in California. Quiet, modest, self-effacing, Jack Hays became the very beau ideal of a captain of Rangers. He came to Texas at the very end of the fight for independence from Mexico in 1836, and worked as a surveyor and alternately as a soldier volunteer. He had been among the Texans in the Plum Creek fight, but made his name in the decade afterwards, astounding people who knew only his reputation upon meeting him for the first time. He was slight, short and refined in appearance and manner, and looked about fourteen years old. But he was also a gifted leader of irregular fighters and possessed an iron constitution. His fearlessness and daring became a byword among his fellow Rangers and  his Tonkawa Indian allies and scouts. Chief Placido of the Tonkawa exclaimed admiringly, “Me and Red Wing not afraid to go to hell together. Captain Jack heap brave; not afraid to go to hell by himself.” The Texas historian T.H. Fehrenbach noted, “He mauled Indians from the Nueces to the Llano, and never with more than fifty men.”

 

He gained fame everlasting in a peculiarly concrete way, with the Big Fight. This encounter was actually just one of many brush-fire fights between Hays’ Rangers and the Comanche during the existence of the Republic of Texas early in the 1840s. There were so very many skirmishes and fights between his San Antonio ranger company (which operated with the funding and participation of many early Anglo residents) and those Comanche raiders who came down from the Llano to make free with any horses, captives and portable loot they could carry away. It is my own opinion that such encounters happened so often that they tended to run together in the minds of those rangers fortunate enough to survive them. I also suspect that Jack Hayes was too busy in the field, either fighting Indians or pursuing his profession as a surveyor, and too personally modest to write detailed after-action reports in a manner which would content historians.

In the summer of 1844, settlers in the gentle rolling country north of San Antonio were particularly jumpy. Captain Hays led out a patrol of fourteen of his volunteers on a long patrol into the wilderness between the Pedernales and Llano Rivers, looking to find traces and trails of raiders coming down from the open plains north of the Hill Country. Of his comrades on that long patrol, one stood out for having already had a most eventful life in Texas. Samuel Walker was about the same age as Jack Hays, and also rather unassuming in manner and boyish-appearing, he was not a Southerner, but a Yankee from Maryland, and a veteran of the Seminole War in Florida. He had also participated in the ill-judged attack on Mier, survived the Black Bean Draw and a stint of durance vile in Mexico’s Perote Prison, from whence he had escaped before (presumably slightly out of breath) joining Jack Hays’ Ranger Company. More »

The Fight at Plum Creek

13. June 2013 · Comments Off on The Fight at Plum Creek · Categories: Old West · Tags: , , ,

The historian T.H. Fehrenbach postulated that the unique character of Texas came from one thing which differentiated it from other trans-Mississippi states; that it was in a constant state of war for the best part of half a century and so the readiness to fight for life at a moment’s notice became ingrained. Most usually, the fight was with the Comanches, who lived for war, plunder and ransom. While the Anglo settlers occasionally took a break from fighting to farm or ranch, or take up some peaceable trade, the Comanches never did; There was no other means of advancement in their culture, save being a fearless warrior and raider. At the high noon-time of their peak, they were the lords of the southern plains, from the Arkansas River to the Balcones Escarpment, having ruthlessly pushed other tribes out – the Tonkawa, Lipan Apache, the Karankawa and others. The Comanche ranged and raided as far as they pleased, occasionally interrupted by a fragile peace treaty.

Council House - San AntonioA relative period of peace between the Penateka, or southern Comanche, and the Republic of Texas came to a spectacularly violent end in the spring of 1840 during the course of what had been intended as a peace conference in San Antonio. A contingent of chiefs and Texan peace commissioners met in a large building adjoining the town jail, on Main Plaza and Market Street. In token of their good faith, the chiefs had promised – or led the Texans to believe they had been promised they would turn over a number of captives, and sign a treaty. They turned over only a few, one of them a teenaged girl, Matilda Lockhart, who had been savagely abused, raped and mutilated during a year of captivity. She told the disappointed and outraged Texan officials that the Comanches camped outside the town held more than a dozen other captives, including her own sister, but meant to extort large ransoms for each. When the chiefs and the peace commissioners met again, the commissioners asked about the other captives. The leader of the chiefs answered that they had brought in the only one they had. The others were with other tribes. And then he added, insolently, “How do you like that answer?”

The short answer was the Texans did not. There were already soldiers standing by: they were ordered to surround the Council House. The chiefs were told they were held hostage until their warriors returned to their camps and brought back the rest of the hostages. Almost as one, the chiefs drew knives and rushed the soldiers guarding the doors of the Council House. The warriors waiting outside in the yard entered the fray and a short running fight erupted in the street leading down to the San Antonio River. The Council House fight vigorously re-ignited the war between Comanche and Texan, both sides accusing the other of bad faith and treachery. That fall, a huge contingent of Penateka Comanche led by a war leader named Buffalo Hump came roaring down from the Llano Estacado, sweeping down the empty country between the Guadalupe and Lavaca Rivers. They terrorized the town of Victoria and burned Linnville on Lavaca Bay. The citizens of Linnville watched from the refuge of boats offshore, as the Indians looted the warehouses and homes. Then the Penateka departed, with two hundred horses all heavily laden with plunder, but what happened on the return from that spectacular raid set in motion a gathering of forces and personalities who would eventually reduce the proud lords of the Southern Plains to a handful of desperate, starving beggars.

It was not as if the Texans were entirely defenseless; poor in cash, poor in practically everything but land, frontier Texas had attracted large numbers of the restless and adventurous, who were not inclined to accept any sort of insult lying down. With no meaningful standing army, defense of local communities depended on their militia … usually composed of every able-bodied male. The sheer size of Texas and the nature of war waged by the horse-lords of the Southern Plains made it imperative that at least a portion of the militia be mounted. Over the twenty years after the founding of Stephen Austin’s colony the practice evolved for a mounted militia, ready to ride in pursuit of raiders within fifteen minutes after an alarm being sounded. Sometimes they were able to retrieve captives, or stolen horses. More often, the raiding Indians split up and melted like smoke into the wilderness, leaving their pursuers frustrated and fuming. It became quite clear, as more Anglo settlers poured into Texas, that the best defense was in the offense; to field a mounted patrol out ranging the back-country, looking to forestall Indian raids.

Such a Corps of Rangers was formally established on the eve of Texan rebellion against Mexico. Distinct from the militia and the regular army, the mounted ranging companies continued to serve after the war, in various forms, most of them locally supported. The citizen-rangers of the local companies assembled for short periods of time in response to specific dangers, their numbers ever-flexible. They supplied their own arms, horses and equipment. By the time of the Linnville Raid, most of them were veterans of the War for Independence, and had years of experience in the field otherwise; men like Mathew “Old Paint” Caldwell of Gonzales, and the McCulloch brothers, who had handled Sam Houston’s two artillery pieces at the Battle of San Jacinto. Ben McCulloch had even been trained in outdoor skills by no less than Davy Crockett himself. In response to the sack of Linnville, volunteer companies from settlements along the Colorado assembled under Edward Burleson, including Chief Placido and twelve Tonkawa Indians, who had their own score with the Comanche to settle, and twenty-one volunteers from Port Lavaca. Other volunteers gathered from Bastrop, Cuero, Victoria and other towns scattered along the river valleys between the coast and the start of the limestone hills.plum creek fight

Barely a week after the burning of Linnville, companies of volunteer Texans were closing in inexorably on the withdrawing Comanche raiding party, at an open plain by Plum Creek, a tributary of the San Marcos River near present-day Lockhart. Burdened by loot, captives and a slow-moving herd of stolen horses and mules, the raiders had not split up and scattered as was their usual custom – and now they had become the hunted. Buffalo Hump’s war party were closely pursued by part of McCulloch’s Gonzales company, who began seeing exhausted pack animals shot and left by the wayside. Caldwell and the other leaders had deduced the route by which they were returning, and had arranged their forces accordingly. They let the Comanche column pass, under a great cloud of dust and ash, for the prairie had recently been burned over. Not until the Texans rode out from cover in two parallel lines converging on them, did the Comanche warriors even know they had been followed. Some of their gaudily adorned chiefs rode out to put on a show, intending to cover the withdrawal, taunting the waiting Texans, riding back and forth. A Texan sharp-shooter brought down the most flamboyant of the chiefs, and when several warriors rode out to carry his body away, the order for a charge was given. The Texans smashed through the line of Comanche fighters from both sides, and into the loot-laden horse and mule herd. As the herd stampeded, the whole raid dissolved into a rout, a hundred bloody running fights, with the Comanche fighters penned in and ridden down. The battle ran for fifteen miles, with some of the survivors chased as far as Austin. It was later estimated that the tribe lost about a quarter of their effective fighters, and much of the loot.

Meusebach treatyThe Penateka never raided again so far into the settled lands, and fifteen years later Buffalo Hump would be one of the Penateka chiefs who signed a peace treaty with John Meusebach. That treaty lasted, although epidemics of diseases like cholera eventually reduced the Penateka. There is a monument in Fredericksburg, Texas, commemorating that treaty as one which was never broken, and in most years there is a gathering of Comanche and descendants of German settlers to commemorate the event.

(A description of the treaty negotiations between John Meusebach and the Penateka is part of Adelsverein-The Gathering, and the aftermath of the Plum Creek fight is included in Deep in the Heart.)

 

Progress Report: Mrs. Gaskell Meets Zane Grey

08. June 2013 · Comments Off on Progress Report: Mrs. Gaskell Meets Zane Grey · Categories: Book Event, Old West, Random Book and Media Musings

So how is the next book going? Pretty well, actually – I finished two chapters last week, and tallied up what I have so far; a little over 400 pages, but only about another two plot twists and set-piece scenes to go. I’ll do my best to bring it at or around 450 pages. A severe re-read and edit will probably shave it down some, at least I hope so. Brevity is the soul of wit and economical story-telling and characterization is a goal devoutly to be aimed for. It has not escaped my notice that Truckee is my shortest book, and also my best-seller over time. Back to basics, eh? Truckee covered the space of a single year, and had a fairly simple, straight-forward plot and a relatively small cast. My subsequent books were a lot more complicated, but it’s pretty clear that elephantiasis of the narrative is not widely appreciated, although there are exceptions. I will do my best to restrain myself.

This next book is supposed to focus on the next generation of the characters from the Adelsverein Trilogy; Dolph and his English Isobel, of Sam and Lottie Becker, and Lottie’s suitor, Seb Bertrand – all of whom were babies, children or just very young adults by a point halfway through the Trilogy. Time for them to pick up the chore of carrying on the plot, in and around the Centennial year of 1876 – although some of the older characters, heroes and heroines of the earlier narrative make occasional appearances now.

1876; a little more than ten years after the end of the Civil War, which I think was a great scar across the American psyche – as 1914-18 was for Europe. Everything was different, afterwards, although many of those things that made the difference so marked had already been put in train before that marking point. Many who had been rich, or even just well-to-do before the war were impoverished afterwards. But many who had been impoverished before were well-to-do or rich after it through mining, wholesale ranching, transportation, manufacturing and developing new and useful technologies. That very technology made the post-war world a different place; the telegraph brought far places closer, the railway brought them closer still. Before the war, it was pork which had been the favorite meat on American tables; ham, salt pork, bacon. Afterwards, beef from western ranches and shipped to the stockyards and slaughterhouses in the mid-West began to predominate.

Before the war, it was a wagon-journey of six months to get to California from the mid-West, or a long, bone-cracking stagecoach ride of twenty-four days. When the transcontinental railroad was completed – a traveler could go from Council Bluffs to Sacramento in about a week and in relative comfort. Should the traveler possess a parlor car and sufficient funds and connections, the journey could even be done in considerable luxury – instead of the dangerous and difficult trek it had been a mere three decades before. I worked in this transition for the last chapter of Truckee; an elderly man who had been a small boy on the emigrant trail in 1844 traveled east over the route that his family had followed – and noted that it wasn’t have the labor and adventure it had once been. The steam engine brought Europe closer to the US; now it was possible to travel relatively easily, and comfortably. Regularly scheduled steamship packet lines transformed a miserable, cramped journey of a month or six weeks (or even more) to barely a week from New York to Hamburg, or Southampton. I pointed up this transition again, in the Trilogy, comparing the hardships suffered by Magda’s family on their journey from Germany on a on a sailing ship – and how, thirty years later, it was only a week on a steam packet from New York to Hamburg. And in the new book, there is a chapter of the Richter and Becker clans traveling across Texas in their own parlor car; think of the change this represented to those who lived long enough to see and experience it! But there was a shadow over all of this; the shadow of the war.

Another author in the IAG has reminded me of this – that someone visiting the United States ten years later would have noted effects of it, most especially in the South. There would have been the ghosts of the dead from a thousand battles haunting the living with their memories; the badly scarred and disfigured, the chronically ill – and the chronically criminal. Even more visible were those amputees with their crutches and empty sleeves, the widows wearing black, and the young women who never married at all because the boy they loved was buried in the Wilderness, at Gettysburg, or Shiloh. Progress came at a price; and although one can’t say one caused the other, it made the handy demarcation point of a life that for most Americans had been rural and agrarian.

And that’s what I am working around, in The Quivera Trail … then there is the difference between England and Texas, which one has to admit, is still pretty marked. There is a reason that I am describing it to readers as ‘Mrs. Gaskell meets Shane.’

The Only Justice of the Peace…

07. June 2013 · Comments Off on The Only Justice of the Peace… · Categories: Old West · Tags: , , , ,

220px-Roybean2Unlike the lawman featured in last week’s installation of ‘rowdy tales of the old west’ this week’s rogue contrived to live a long and eccentric life, and one – considering his reputation – remarkably unstained by deadly street shootouts, outlawry and violent death, although there was the little matter of that horseback duel … the unsuccessful hanging … and that jail escape. Although he was, as noted, a bit of a rogue and a personality to which legends readily attached themselves, often with his encouragement; he ended his days as justice of the peace in the tiny hamlet of Langtry, Val Verde County, Texas – famously the only law west of the Pecos.

But Phantly Roy Bean had been knocking around the far west for decades before attaining the office for which he is most famed. And yes, that was his real name; his father was also named Phantly – and why he was laden with such a moniker is unknown. In any case, our Phantly Roy ditched the unfortunate first name as soon as possible. He was a Kentuckian who gravitated down river to New Orleans in his mid-teens, got into trouble with authorities there and migrated to San Antonio to work with Sam Bean, an older brother who had worked up a nice business hauling freight after serving in the US Army during the Mexican War. Eventually, the brothers Bean – Roy and another brother, Joshua, followed the Gold Rush to California. Cannily, the brothers Bean did not waste time and energy hunting for gold. Joshua set up a saloon in San Diego, and eventually another one in San Bernardino – but Roy continued to be the scapegrace little brother. There is a pattern here – but he lived long enough to break out of it, at least in a little way.

He was handsome and a snappy dresser, fancied – and fancied enthusiastically in return – by ladies of every nation. He fought a horseback duel with another man in the streets of San Diego, likely over the affections of a local damozel. Both men wounded each other, and startled the town considerably. Bean was arrested, and confined in San Diego’s first proper stone-built jail; the first prisoner confined there, and also the first to escape from it, with the aid of a pair of knives smuggled into him, supposedly concealed in the gift of some tamales from one of his lady admirers. Prudently, Roy moved to San Bernardino to manage the saloon that his brother Joshua had left to him, but trouble followed after, resulting in a duel – again, over the favors of a lady with a rival. This time the other duelist finished up very dead, and at Roy Bean’s hand. Supposedly, several of the rival’s good friends set him on a horse with a noose around his neck and tied to a high branch; only the timely intervention of the woman saved Roy Bean from death by hanging/slow strangulation. In any case, prudence dictated a prompt remove from California. He joined his other brother Sam, in running a saloon and grocery store in a hamlet near Silver City, New Mexico. During the last years of the Civil War, he was working as a teamster again, in San Antonio, hauling cotton to Matamoros, Mexico, to evade the Union blockade.

The post-war years saw him remaining in San Antonio, varying his career by keeping a saloon, and retailing firewood, beef and milk to the good housewives of the area. Alas, the firewood was cut from a neighbors’ wood-lot, the beef also rustled from neighbors; the milk was was adulterated with creek water and when an indignant customer objected to strenuously to the presence of live minnows swimming in the Grade-A, Roy Bean is alleged to have answered that he would stop allowing the cows to drink from the creek. In the first year of peace, Roy Bean took to himself a wife of his own instead of someone else’s. She was Virginia Chavez, a woman not quite half his age, and the marriage was bitterly acrimonious, in spite of (or because of) producing four children. Roy Bean parted from her in the early 1880s and also from San Antonio. A storekeeper in the neighborhood where they had lived was so eager to see Roy Bean gone, that he purchased all of their spare possessions – just so that Bean would have the means of leaving town. Roy separated from his wife, deposited the children with various friends and went west … one more time.

His new enterprise was a saloon in a railway camp in West Texas, which proved to be equally knockabout, until he settled on a permanent location. Typically for him, it was on land that he did not own, on the railroad right of way in Langtry. The railway camps were lawless and rowdy places, with the nearest court of any kind at all being in Fort Stockton, a good two hundred miles away. As appallingly misguided as it seems at first glance (and even on a second), Roy Bean was the nearest available person resembling a solid citizen of fixed abode in the opinion of the local Texas Ranger detachment, who had become wearied with the chore of hauling apprehended miscreants all the way to Fort Stockton. This does bring one to wonder about any of the other candidates. In any case, Roy Bean was appointed as a Justice of the Peace for the district. He held court in his saloon for the larger part of the next two decades, famously advertising himself as the only law west of the Pecos.

For someone who had notoriously trodden well over the side of the law in his day, he didn’t seem to have done too bad a job, given the age and the circumstance. Certainly it satisfied his neighbors, who routinely returned him to office by election until 1896, in spite of his administrative eccentricities. He routinely recessed the court to sell liquor to all present, drafted the barflies present to serve on the jury, and used the butt of his revolver as a gavel. In his rulings from the bench, he was guided only by rough pragmatism and those statutes in the 1879 edition of The Revised Statutes of Texas of which he personally approved. Since he did not have a jail at his disposal, he was at a disadvantage in administering punishments – but never mind. Fines would do; and by interesting coincidence, those fines were always the exact sum of money which the convicted had on him. If the convicted was dead broke, JP Bean’s sentence usually included performing any casual labor needing doing in the district. Only two death sentences were ever handed down in Bean’s court – and one of the condemned promptly escaped. Judge Bean proved adamant concerning turning over the income from fines to the State of Texas, claiming that his court was self-sustaining.

By the end of his life, a large proportion of the fines and the profits from his saloon went to assist the poor and – touchingly – to keep the local public school supplied with firewood. Even without reelection, he continued to administer his eccentric brand of justice until his death in 1903. (From natural causes, I will add.) By then he was a celebrity, and for all of that rather an endearing and relatively harmless one. Certainly, his neighbors thought the world of him. But that is Texas for you.

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