Exaggerated Mayhem

When a cowboy came into Abilene, Dodge City or Wichita after months on the trail, he wanted booze, music, merriment and women.  The townspeople were eager to cater to them within reason, but unwilling to turn the entire town over to these cowboys.  The merchants, in their zeal to keep order, were known to hire the wrong people to uphold the law.

Case in point - during the panic of 1873 when thousands of unsold cattle and restless cowboys flooded the town of Ellsworth, the town hired an illiterate, loud-mouthed guy with a trigger-finger always ready for action named "Happy Jack" Morco.  Morco alienated the Texans so much that the cattlemen threatened to burn down the town and take their business elsewhere.  At that, the local merchants dismissed Morco,  who refused to disarm and was shot dead by one of his own policemen.

Transition from law enforcement to law breaking was not uncommon.  Marshal Henry Brown of Caldwell, a former gunfighter, held up a bank in the nearby town of Medicine Lodge, after two years on the police force.  He killed two people.  The town's outraged citizens promptly shot the marshal and lynched his three henchmen proving that vigilante justice has it own justice.

Generally, though law enforcement was pretty lenient and effective.  From 1870-1885 the homicide rate for the five major cattle towns was just 45.  Some of the incidents, such as the shooting of a woman by her drunken husband had no connection to the cattle industry.  Few were the famous gunfights of novels and movies.

Cowboy were required by law to check their guns at the sheriff's office while in town.  As Granville Stuart writes in 1925:  "The first place cowboys went for in a town was the livery stable where they saw to it that their horses were properly cared for, then the barber shop.  The noisy fellow in exaggerated costume that rode up and down the street whooping and shooting in the air was never a cowpuncher from any outfit.  He was usually a would-be bad man from the East decked out in paraphernalia from Montgomery Ward's in Chicago." 

Cattle towns were indeed raw and colorful, but such goes our legends of the shoot-em-up Wild West...just a legend made up to sell novels, newspaper and the movies.

Next time...The Expanding Range
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Today in Pioneer History: "On July 16, 1779, American Brigadier General Anthony Wayne launches a coup de main against British fortifications at Stony Point, New York, on the orders of General George Washington. He earns the moniker “Mad” Anthony Wayne for the ensuing maneuver.  Wayne was victorious at the Battle of Fallen Timbers near what is now Toledo, Ohio, and gained much of what would become Ohio and Indiana for the U.S. in the Treaty of Greenville.