Читать книгу Spurred West - Ian Neligh - Страница 10

CHAPTER 3

SHOOTISTS OF THE OLD (AND NEW) WEST

The man is half bent over backward, precariously balancing on the heels of his cowboy boots, the fingers on his right hand itching for the handle of his single-action revolver. His left hand hovers in the air in front of him, fingers trembling with anticipation. In this position, he waits for maybe five seconds. Then the light in the center of a metal target twenty-one feet away turns orange, and he and the five other Cowboy Fast Draw competitors pull out their pistols and fire. He misses his shot. There’s no doubt the man is as fast as an angry rattlesnake, especially when his holstered gun is horizontal with the target, but he can’t get the points if he doesn’t hit the target. There would be another chance. Again he assumes the half-bent position, thighs straining, left hand dangling in the air. His peers down the line take a somewhat more traditional vertical shooting position. The light turns orange and gunfire once again fills the air.

It is the Four Corners Territorial Fast Draw Championship in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, where the best in four states would see who is the fastest shootist of them all. They pull guns and fire in less than half a second, sending wax bullets into, or in some cases somewhat near, the target. All things considered, that was also the way it was when trying to shoot quickly back in the Old West. In a gunfight, speed was sometimes used at the fatal cost of accuracy. They often attribute the legendary Wyatt Earp as saying, “Fast is fine, but accuracy is final.” Wild West lawman Bat Masterson agreed during an interview that speed was important during a gunfight, but nerve was even more so: “I knew a man named Charlie Harrison in the old days. He was the most brilliant performer with a pistol of any man I have ever seen and he could shoot straighter and faster than many of the great fighters, yet when he got into a scrap with a man named Jim Levy he missed him with all six shots at close range before Levy could reach for his weapon. Levy coolly dropped him with a single shot. Harrison was brave, but he had no nerve, you see.”

Behind the target and a burlap-like curtain that stopped the errant wax bullets from harassing the town’s tourists, I sit at a table with David “Mongo” Miller and his wife Shirley, also known as “Wench.” “That’s like you see in a saloon—not like you find on a jeep,” David says of Shirley’s alias. The retired couple, both dressed in period-authentic clothing, have long participated in the fast draw sport since its earliest days in 2004—and are some of the quickest around. David has finished tenth overall in the world six times.

Big Ugly, Annie Moose Killer, Ben Quicker, Mad Dog Martin, Mr. Big Shot, Nitro—everyone involved in the sport of Cowboy Fast Draw has an alias, not unlike the original Old West personalities like Sundance Kid, Billy the Kid, Wild Bill, Curly Bill, and Buffalo Bill. “You just kind of pick them at random,” David admits, adding his own name Mongo was after the large, rather slow character played by Alex Karras in Mel Brooks’s 1974 comedy classic Blazing Saddles. David served in the Marine Corps from 1969 to 1975 before selling dialysis machines, where he met Shirley, then a nurse. David sold computers for years before retiring in the early 2000s. Like many from his generation, he grew up watching television’s classic black-and-white Westerns.

“We watched Bonanza, we watched Gunsmoke, we watched Have Gun – Will Travel, we watched all that stuff,” David says. “That’s what this is, it is all about the romance of the Old West. Being able to stand there dressed like Paladin or John Wayne and with a six-gun on your side and actually shoot in fast draw, even though we’re not shooting at somebody—it is just still kind of about the romance of the Old West.”

Gunfights in the Old West were rarely simple, clean, or for that matter particularly cinematic. In Thomas Dimsdale’s 1921 book The Vigilantes of Montana, he records a fight in the winter of 1862 or 1863 between George Carrhart and George Ives, who were walking down the street of Bannack, Montana (now a ghost town), when an altercation broke out. The dispute became increasingly heated between the two men until Ives said he’d shoot Carrhart. Without further delay, Ives ran off to the local grocery to fetch his gun where it was waiting for him.

Carrhart ran to his cabin to get his firearm and then waited outside with the six-shooter held down by his side. When Ives burst out of the grocery store, he was armed and ready—but looking in the wrong direction. Carrhart waited for Ives to turn and face him. When Ives finally saw him, he swore, raised his six-shooter, and fired at Carrhart. The bullet missed, striking the side of a house next to where Carrhart was standing. Carrhart answered in kind by raising his own firearm and pulled the trigger, but his weapon misfired. Ives hastily shot a second time, but this bullet hit the ground in front of Carrhart.

Carrhart then took his second shot and aimed for Ives’s face—but somehow the bullet missed. Possibly dismayed, Carrhart ran into a nearby house, stuck his six-gun out of the door, and fired again at Ives, who also shot back. The two blasted away at one another until Ives finally ran out of bullets. He turned to walk off when Carrhart came out of the house, with one shot left, and carefully aimed at Ives and fired. This time the bullet hit, striking Ives in the back and near one side. The bullet reportedly went straight through his body and hit the ground in front of Ives, kicking up dirt. Ives wasn’t even close to dead. He turned and swore at Carrhart for shooting him in the back, then stormed off again to fetch another loaded six-gun. No doubt deciding he’d had enough, Carrhart fled from the scene. Supposedly the men ended their dispute soon after and lived together on Carrhart’s ranch over the remainder of the winter.

Unusual stories like this show that two men even at close range sometimes had a difficult time hitting and killing the other. Misfires and misses were common. In my research I found an interesting story about two men who were playing cards when a gunfight broke out. One man got his gun out first, but because they were so close his opponent’s pocket watch chain kept his six-shooter’s hammer from falling and firing the bullet—which ultimately cost him his life.

The romance of the West is something largely concocted from nostalgia by people who didn’t actually have to live through it. The Wild West wasn’t full of men staring each other down the length of a dirty street, waiting for the clock to strike high noon before trying to gun each other down. Such fantasy is often the mortar of which most of the romance of the time is constructed. That’s not to say that it didn’t happen. There were men who unerringly hit what they were aiming at with predictably fatal results. One such man was given the nickname “Wild Bill” and may have been the greatest gunslinger who ever lived.

Tall Tales of Wild Bill Hickok

In all likelihood it was August 1865, several months after the Civil War, when Harper’s New Monthly Magazine journalist George Ward Nichols found himself in Springfield, Missouri. Sitting in the shade of an awning, he was both fighting the need to take a nap and looking on at the residents of the area with thinly veiled superiority and contempt. “Men and women dressed in queer costumes; men with coats and trousers made of skin, but so thickly covered with dirt and grease as to have defied the identity of the animal when walking in the flesh,” he said. He couldn’t have known it at the time, but the story Nichols had come out to write would make history.

There is little doubt the exploits of then Army Scout James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok were well known by the people in the region, for better or worse. Hickok, a gunslinger in the truest sense, arguably had the first recorded quick draw shootout of the West. All the same, dime novelists and Hickok himself exaggerated his story up until that time and going forward beyond his death to a ridiculous degree. Still, it cannot be discounted that Nichols was about to meet the deadliest gunslinger in American history.

A man roused the journalist from his judgmental stupor to introduce him to Hickok who had come riding down the street. “Let me at once describe the personal appearance of the famous Scout of the Plains,” Nichols said. “‘Wild Bill’ who now advanced toward me, fixing his clear gray eyes on mine in a quick, interrogative way, as if to take my measure.”

Before Nichols stood a slender, tall man, about six-foot-two, who wore bright yellow moccasins and a deerskin shirt. “His small, round waist was girthed by a belt which held two of Colt’s Navy revolvers,” Nichols said. It appears Hickok was more than happy to talk up his own legend and frontier prowess. Just a few days before, he had killed a man in a duel in the city’s Park Central Square. Nichols heard an account of it from an Army captain who was enthusiastically working his way through a bottle of whiskey. Apparently there was bad blood between Hickok and a man named Dave Tutt, a former Confederate and gambler. According to the captain, Tutt had been looking to start trouble with Hickok for several days, and after a game of cards he had further provoked Wild Bill by taking Hickok’s watch off the table and pocketing it for not paying his debts.

“I don’t want ter make a row in this house. It’s a decent house, and I don’t want ter injure the keeper. You’d better put that watch back on the table,” Hickok said in Nichols’s account. Other reports of the incident had Hickok telling Tutt in no uncertain terms that if he took the watch he’d be a dead man. “But Dave grinned at Bill mighty ugly, and walked off with the watch, and kept it several days.”

The captain then told Nichols one day that friends of Tutt’s drew their guns on Hickok and dared him to fight, adding Tutt would wear the watch out in public tomorrow at noon in a personal affront to Hickok’s honor—unless Hickok wanted to do something about it. The next day Hickok came out into the town square and found that a crowd had gathered, which included many of Tutt’s friends. The two men came to within about fifty yards of each other with pistols already drawn. “At that moment you could have heard a pin drop in that square. Both Tutt and Bill fired, but one discharge followed the other so quick that it’s hard to say which went off first,” Nichols wrote.

Before even waiting to see if his bullet hit Tutt, Hickok turned on a crowd comprising of Tutt’s friends and pointed his gun at them. According to the story, many had already drawn their own weapons or were starting to. “‘Aren’t yer satisfied, gentlemen?’ Hickok asked the crowd. ‘Put up your shootin-irons, or there’ll be more dead men here.’ And they put ’em up, and said it war a far fight,” Nichols wrote.

As for Tutt, he had turned sideways in dueling fashion to make himself a smaller target—but Hickok’s bullet hit him regardless and went into his side, striking him in the heart. Tutt stood still for a moment or two after being hit and, according to the inebriated captain, raised his gun as if to shoot again, then walked forward several steps before falling to the ground dead. When given the chance, Nichols didn’t miss the opportunity to ask Hickok about the gunfight. “Do you not regret killing Tutt? You surely do not like to kill men?” Nichols asked him in a saloon.

“As ter killing men,” Hickok replied, “I never thought much about it. Most of the men I have killed it was one or the other of us, and at such times you don’t stop to think; and what’s the use after it’s all over? As for Tutt, I had rather not have killed him, for I want ter settle down quiet here now. But thar’s been hard feeling between us a long while. I wanted ter keep out of that fight; but he tried to degrade me, and I couldn’t stand that, you know, for I am a fighting man, you know.”

Predictably Nichols’s account, regardless of its accuracy or dubious colloquialisms, propelled Hickok to frontier stardom. At the time Hickok was already friends with “Buffalo Bill” Cody. In his fantastical autobiography, Cody said of his friend “Wild Bill” that the two had known each other since 1857. While he, or his biographers, claimed many things that are unlikely to have happened, the two did indeed serve together as scouts for the Army and later performed side by side in Wild West performances.

Hickok also made a good impression on General George Armstrong Custer. Custer described Hickok as a plainsman in every sense of the word, but unlike his peers: “Whether on foot or on horseback, he was one of the most perfect types of physical manhood I ever saw.” Custer said Hickok was a man of courage, something he’d personally witnessed on many occasions. “His skill in the use of the rifle and pistol was unerring; while his deportment was exactly the opposite of what might be expected from a man of his surroundings. It was entirely free from all bluster or bravado. He seldom spoke of himself unless requested to do so. His conversation, strange to say, never bordered either on the vulgar or blasphemous. His influence among the frontiersmen was unbounded, his word was law …” But Custer added Hickok wasn’t a man who went looking for trouble. Trouble, however, always seemed to find him. “‘Wild Bill’ is anything but a quarrelsome man; yet no one but himself can enumerate the many conflicts in which he had been engaged, and which I have a personal knowledge of at least a half a dozen men whom he has at various times killed, one of these being at the time a member of my command,” Custer said. “Others have been severely wounded, yet he always escapes unhurt.”

Just how many people Hickok killed either during the war, as a scout for the Army, or in the times between isn’t exactly known. While being interviewed by journalist Henry Stanley, who was writing for the Weekly Missouri Democrat in 1867 and would later become famous for his own travels in Africa and coining the phrase “Doctor Livingstone, I presume,” Hickok boasted killing a ridiculous number of men.

“He claimed to have killed 100 men and said he killed his first when he was 28 years old,” Stanley said. “After a little deliberation, he replied, ‘I would be willing to take my oath on the Bible tomorrow that I have killed over a hundred a long ways off.’” Whether Hickok was just inflating his already outrageous reputation or having a little fun with the former Confederate writer isn’t known—but it was a time when men who already had nearly superhuman deeds under the belt often gleefully propelled themselves to superhero status for the eastern periodicals.

“No, by Heaven! I never killed one man without a good cause,” Hickok replied when asked. “I was twenty-eight years old when I killed the first white man, and if ever a man deserved killing he did. He was a gambler and counterfeiter, and I was in a hotel in Leavenworth City then, as seeing some loose characters around, I ordered a room, and as I had some money about me, I thought I would go to it. I had lain some thirty minutes on the bed when I heard some men at the door. I pulled out my revolver and Bowie knife and held them ready, but half concealed, pretending to be asleep. The door was opened and five men entered the room. They whispered together, ‘Let us kill the son of a bitch; I bet he has got money.’”

Hickok then claimed that he stabbed the man with his own knife and used his revolvers wounding another. He then rushed for help and came back with a soldier who captured the rest of the gang.

“We searched the cellar and found eleven bodies buried there—men who had been murdered by those villains,” Hickok said. Stanley said Hickok then turned to him and the rest of the company listening to the tale and asked, “Would you have not done the same? That was the first man I killed and I was never sorry for that yet.”

Colorful stories aside, there are some officially recorded deaths we know Hickok was responsible for, including David McCanles in 1861, who he shot from behind a curtain at a Pony Express Station in Nebraska. Depending on the source, McCanles was a bandit gang leader, a thief, a bully, or just a man looking to get money from the station which was owed to him. Regardless, McCanles came to that fateful day with help including two other men named James Gordon and James Woods. The story goes that after Wild Bill shot McCanles, James Gordon came into the station investigating the gunshots and was also shot by Hickok. Wild Bill stepped outside and then shot James Woods. Woods wasn’t yet dead and the station manager’s wife finished him off with a hoe. Wounded and trying to escape, Gordon later received the coup de grâce when some other station employees armed with a shotgun discovered him. The whole bloody affair was later deemed a matter of self-defense.

In October of that year Hickok joined the Union Army as a scout and likely saw more action. Then in 1865 he killed David Tutt over the pocket watch in Springfield, Missouri, and made history. Over the next several years he worked as a sheriff, Deputy U.S. Marshal, and City Marshal, killing five more men along the way. Among those five included John Kile, who, with Jeremiah Lonergan, both Seventh Calvary Troopers, got into a fight with Hickok in a saloon in Hays City. The story has it that in 1870 the troopers had Hickok on the floor and Lonergan kept him in place as Kile put his pistol in Hickok’s ear and pulled the trigger. But the hammer fell on a dud, giving Hickok the chance to get ahold of his own pistol. In quick order he shot Kile in the leg, then put two bullets in Lonergan and killed him. Afterward, Hickok waited, armed at the town’s cemetery, to see if any of the other troopers wanted to take an opportunity in the name of revenge. Apparently, none did.

The last man Hickok killed was fellow lawman Mike Williams in 1871. During an incident gambler Phil Coe allegedly took two shots at Hickok who responded by mortally wounding him. Hickok’s deputy Williams burst out on the street to assist Hickok in the encounter and Hickok spun around and shot Williams dead. This was the end of his law enforcement career. Hickok worked for a time, unsuccessfully, at trying his own Wild West show and then later with his old friends Buffalo Bill Cody and Ned Buntline, but time and the call of the frontier lured him once again back West. Rudderless, as so many of the gunslingers were, Hickok drifted around from town to town trying to seek his fortune at the gambling tables. In 1872 he arrived in Georgetown, Colorado, a town known for its rich silver mines, and spent six weeks gambling without issue before heading off once again.

In Defense of a Bad Man to Fool With

By this point his reputation was quite fearsome; however, his time of shooting others was behind him. Hickok rightfully became paranoid and began sitting at card games so that he could face the door and see any potential attackers as they came for him. The discovery of gold near Deadwood, South Dakota, drew him to yet another boomtown. Finding the work of the gold fields not quite to his liking, he again ended up in town gambling. On August 2, 1876, Hickok, at age forty-eight, went to the Number 10 Saloon to play cards. The only available seat was the one with its back to the door. Legend has it that he took it and continued to play hand after hand in the seat, despite trying to get someone to switch with him. It was late afternoon when Jack McCall from Kentucky came into the saloon, pointed a gun at the back of Hickok’s head, and fired. A special correspondent for the Chicago Inter-Ocean was in Deadwood and heard the shot, ran to the saloon, and rather ghoulishly reported the specific details of Hickok’s demise.

“Yesterday afternoon about 4 o’clock the people of this city were started by the report of a pistol-shot in the saloon … Your correspondent at once hastened to the spot and found J.B. Hickok, commonly known as ‘Wild Bill,’ lying senseless upon the floor. He had been shot by a man known as Jack McCall. An examination showed that a pistol had been fired close to the back of the head, the bullet entering the base of the brain, a little to the right of the center, passing through in a straight line, making its exit through the right cheek between the upper and lower jaw-bones, loosening several of the molar teeth in its passage, and carrying a portion of the cerebellum through the wound.”

Newspapers had incorrectly reported his death in the past, but this time it was real. James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok was dead. During the murder trial, the reporter noted McCall assumed a nonchalance and bravado “which was foreign to his feelings, and betrayed by the spasmodic heavings of his heart.” The paper said a witness at the card table during the shooting saw McCall place the barrel of his gun to the back of Hickok’s head and say, “Take that,” before pulling the trigger. At first McCall said the act was done in revenge for the death of his own brother. But this was just one of several stories McCall said in his own defense, which changed multiple times. McCall was somehow acquitted, then retried and ultimately hanged.

“It appears that Bill died in just the way and manner he did not wish to die—that is, with his boots on,” said a writer for the Kansas City Times. “His life during the past five or six years has been one of constant watchfulness and expectation, as more than one reckless frontiersman had coolly contracted to take his life. But Bill was never off guard, and woe unto the wretched devil who failed to ‘get the drop’ on the long-haired William. More than one fool has had a bullet sent crushing through his brains from the ever-ready pistol of this cool and silent desperado … He has many warm friends in this city, as well as all over the West, who will regret to hear of his tragic end, the end he has so long been expecting.”

In 1909 William Cody wrote a letter for the New York Herald defending his friend Hickok from being labeled one of the bad men of the frontier. Cody said Hickok was instead a “bad man to fool with.”

“Never was there a man most misunderstood by the people of the present day who are impressed by the nickname, as it intimated a crazy thirst for human life,” Cody said. “This is a wrong impression. Some consideration must be given to the peculiar conditions that existed in a section that was a more politically and socially volcanic, disorganized locality …” He reasoned that the frontier tended to draw those who were adventurous, vicious, and who were sometimes evading justice, which only grew worse after the Civil War. “There drifted in a host of men addicted to all kinds of excesses, and whose actions were almost, one might say, invited by the simple, unorganized and unprotected life then existing among the early settlers. Some idea of the atmosphere in which natives like Hickok and myself had been born and raised can be imagined from this description.”

Looking in context, Cody believed Hickok was a necessary product of his time. Though an impressive gunslinger and not afraid of confrontation, as far as Cody was aware Hickok never provoked a fight.

Cody commemorated his friend: “‘Wild Bill’ now lies buried in the Deadwood Cemetery. His name will always live in a romantic history stranger than fiction.”

The Sport of the Cowboy Fast Draw

While Hickok was dead, his story would become legend, myth, then movies and television. About 130 years after Hickok was buried in Deadwood, a fictionalized drama about the town, its salty residents, and the death of Hickok aired on television. David and Shirley Miller had been watching the show Deadwood one evening when Shirley turned to her husband and mentioned that she had never been to Deadwood. David decided the time was right that they make the trip from Colorado to the town. He glanced at the town’s chamber of commerce website to see what events there were and spotted something about a “fast draw exhibition.” Intrigued, they went to Deadwood and attended a shooting match. At this time, the Cowboy Fast Draw sport was only a few years old.

“I was sitting in the bleachers and I was like, ‘This is not an exhibition—these guys are doing something,’” David remembers. Indeed, they were competing to see who had the fastest gun. David decided he was interested in trying his own hand at it. However, Shirley said she wanted nothing to do with it, having never touched a gun. She tells me she would often leave the room, or even the house, when David was cleaning his own firearms collection. Undeterred, David went to a Denver gun store and bought a Colt single-action revolver—also known as a Peace Maker, and the only firearm allowed in the quick draw competitions. “There’s any number of manufacturers now that make a faithful reproduction of the Colt Peace Maker and that’s what we have to use,” David says, adding he went straight home and practiced in his basement with plastic bullets.

Just six weeks later the first-ever quick draw world championships came to Deadwood, and David went to compete against some of the fastest guns in the world. He ended up placing thirteenth out of sixty competitors. Shirley wasn’t sure if she even wanted to be involved but at the last second decided to strap on a holster even though she’d never touched a firearm before then.

“I said those women made it look easy. I’ll figure this out because—I love the costumes. Still do,” Shirley says. “And I didn’t even know how to load it, so my hand judge had to physically load my gun. Everything you could do wrong, I did, and I had so much fun … I came in thirteenth in the world for the women that year—of course, there were only thirteen of us. And I’ve been hooked ever since.”

As we talk, Shirley loads ammunition, putting primers in cases with wax bullets. Her fingers move with the type of secondhand nature that comes from having done a thing a thousand times before. David tells me the two of them took to the organization and, outside of the Marine Corps, he’s never encountered a more tight-knit group of people. Over the years their own involvement in the sport grew to where they were both helping to set up other groups under the organization’s banner.

“We started traveling around, helping people get started and helping matches run, and all of a sudden we got the reputation [of] ‘Well, Mongo and Wench, they’ll come down and help’—and we did,” David says.

Fastest Guns in the World

With one shooter trying to be the fastest, David says there are often rivalries that naturally form from one competition to the next, that often last years and go from state to state.

“A lot of smack talk,” Shirley agrees.

“Not bitter rivalries … but there are definite rivalries. There are rivalries that have gone on for years,” David says. “It’s called fast draw, but the thing about it is that target down there is a big equalizer. I don’t care how fast you are—if you can’t hit that target you’re not going to win a match.”

David admits that there are a lot of competitors who are faster than he is. “But up until just recently, I was sitting fifth overall in the world in points because I have had a good season up to date—and I’m fast enough that you can’t really lollygag. I’m not going to beat the fast shooters but I’m also known to have probably a 75 to 80 percent accuracy.” And that’s the issue. Someone can pull their gun and fire at just under the speed of light—but if they miss the target, then it’s all for nothing.

Fast draw competitors fire their guns during the Four Corners Territorial Fast Draw Championship in Pagosa Springs, Colorado. (Photo by Billie Diemand)

“I think the secret is: don’t overthink it,” David says. “Get your head out of the way. Let your reactions take over. Once you practice a little bit and you get that natural movement down, let that take over and let that control you. Don’t let your mind get in the way.”

Often competitors are in such a hurry to draw their firearm at the competition, they miss the target—again, and again, and again. The winning shootist needs only to hit the target three out of five times.

“Sometimes you get up there with a guy and you’re so intent, there’s this rivalry thing … you might shoot eight to twelve shots before somebody finally wins three,” David says. “Last year we had a group that went forty-seven shots—each opponent shot forty-seven times before we had a winner.” At the distance of twenty-one feet, if the pistol’s aim is even an eighth of an inch off, the bullet will miss the target.

Today David and Shirley dedicate most of their time to the sport, which essentially grew from the tales of Hickok’s own gunslinging prowess. Cowboy Fast Draw competitors are not alone in their romance of the Wild West and appreciation of period-appropriate costumes. There’s the similarly themed World Fast Draw Association; and for those interested in live rounds, there’s the Single Action Shooting Society or Cowboy Action Shooting, started in the 1980s, which also has competitors dress in Old West costumes. For enthusiasts who prefer their Wild West experience on horseback, there’s the Cowboy Mounted Shooting, where competitors shoot at balloons using birdshot in timed events testing both horse and rider. Cowboy Fast Draw competitions have gained popularity even in Japan where, because of firearm restrictions, contestants use specially made revolvers constructed of hard plastic, capable of only shooting blanks or plastic BBs.

Anywhere you go, wherever it is, with whatever spin or angle is added, the enthusiasm for the West still endures.