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The Gunfighters

Robert Ford, posing with the gun he used to kill Jesse James.

Ben Collins

Ben Collins served as an Indian policeman in Indian Territory, and in 1898 he received an appointment as deputy U.S. marshal. Collins made a number of sensational arrests, including an incident in which he was forced to shoot Port Pruitt, an influential resident of Emet. Partially paralyzed, Pruitt and his brother Clint, a prominent citizen from Orr, swore revenge against Collins. In 1905 a gunman acquaintance of Collins told the officer he had been paid two hundred dollars to kill him, with an extra three hundred dollars to come after completion of the job. The hired gun skipped the country with a two-hundred-dollar profit, but the next year Collins was assassinated by Jim Miller.

Thalis T. Cook

During the 1890's Thalis Cook served in Company D of the Texas Rangers. He was a crack shot, but his lethal inclinations were tempered by his activities as a church worker and Bible student. Although a knee wound resulted in a permanent limp, Cook saw repeated action while riding with Ranger Captain John Hughes.

Scott Cooley

Cooley was a Texas frontiersman who pursued a variety of occupations before becoming a central figure of the Mason County War in 1875. At one time a member of Company D of the Texas Rangers, Cooley turned in his badge to pursue of more peaceful vocation. He trailed a couple of herds to Kansas for a Mason County rancher named Tim Williamson, and when Cooley contracted typhoid fever, he was nursed back to health by Mrs. Williamson.

Cooley later acquired a farm near Menard in a neighboring county, but when Williamson was murdered, Cooley bitterly returned to Mason County to seek vengeance. The Mason County War was essentially a clash between Anglos and Germans in the area, and the conflict was aggravated by local cattle thefts. There were assorted shootings, and Williamson was a victim of the German faction. When Cooley arrived on the scene, he promptly killed two men, then became the leader of several other gunmen and continued his path of violence.

Texas Rangers were called in and soon quelled the feud, but Cooley, who previously had served with several of the lawmen, managed to escape arrest. He returned to Blanco County, a former haunt, but he soon fell ill and died.

James Copeland

Copeland terrorized parts of Southern Mississippi during the 1830s and the 1840s. So infamous was Copeland that he became a household name from Mobile Bay to Lake Pontchatarain as a man of violence, a robber and a killer who created trouble wherever he went. Like many of his kind, Copeland was born to respectable folk, his father a veteran of the War of 1812. He was born in the Pascagoula River Valley near the Mississippi Gulf Coast, about ten miles from the Alabama border. Copeland began his life of crime at the tender age of twelve. Copeland claimed that his mother upheld his 'rascality' when he was accused of stealing pigs from a neighbor. She and a man named Gale H. Wages, a notorious character from Mobile, convinced the boy that if the local courthouse were burned down, evidence against him would no longer exist!

From then on, Copeland, aided by Wages, turned to crime. These were the days before Colt's revolvers were readily available, and great reliance was placed upon single-shot pistols, shotguns and knives. But lack of firepower did not impair Copeland's rise to infamy. In 1841, accompanied by Wages and some other companions, he took a trip to Texas. From there the gang moved to Ohio, Louisiana and back to Mississippi, following a lucrative tour.

In the winter and spring of 1848, Wages and another gang member were shot by a man named James A. Harvey, who was himself murdered by Copeland. In 1849 Copeland was arrested and charged with larceny and sentenced to four years in the Alabama penitentiary. On his release in 1853, he was promptly re-arrested by the Mississippi authorities and charged with grand larceny. Following two years in the state pen, he was then handed over to the sheriff of Perry County, who placed him in jail to await trial for the Harvey murder. Two years later, in 1857, he was put on trial, found guilty and sentenced to hang.

Timothy Isaiah Courtright ("Longhaired Jim")

Courtright, a native of Iowa, fought during the Civil War under Union General John ("Black Jack") Logan. After the war Courtright drifted to Texas, where he was employed by Logan as an army scout. In 1876 he was appointed city marshal of Fort Worth, a job he held for three years. Three years later Courtright went to Lake Valley, a booming New Mexico silver camp, where he secured a job as an ore guard with the American Mining Company. He was then once more employed by General Logan, this time as foreman of the old officer's New Mexico ranch.

Prominent among his duties was the assignment of keeping Logan's range clear of rustlers and sodbusters, and after killing two squatters, Courtright fled New Mexico to avoid trial. He returned to Fort Worth and opened a private detective firm known as the T.I.C. Commercial Agency, but soon extradition papers were served on him. Friends fastened a pair of six-guns beneath a cafe table, however, and using these weapons and a saddled mount, Courtright escaped custody. He hid aboard a train headed for Galveston, and from there he took a ship to New York. He wandered through Canada and into Washington, and then he went to New Mexico and succeeded in clearing his name of all charges.

Courtright next returned to Fort Worth and reopened the T.I.C., although the agency's primary activity was a protection racket by which the town's gambling joints were "policed" in return for a piece of the action. Luke Short, part owner of the White Elephant Saloon, flatly refused to pay, and when Courtright confronted him, the little gambler shot Longhaired Jim to death.

Jim Crane

Crane was connected with the notorious Clanton-McLaury "ring" in southern Arizona. He engaged in cattle rustling and in 1881 was involved in an abortive attempt to rob a stagecoach, during which he allegedly killed the driver. Crane and two accomplices, Harry Head and Bill Leonard, remained at large until Head and Leonard were killed while trying to hold up a store. In revenge Crane engineered the deaths of the owners of the store, but was himself hunted down and killed a short time later.

Ben Cravens

Often called the last of the notorious Oklahoma outlaws, Cravens was the troublesome son of farmer B. B. Cravens. Ben ran away to the lawless Indian Territory after being jailed for tearing up the local school. He became a horse thief, whiskey runner, and train robber. Frequently arrested, he just as frequently escaped from jail. He broke out of custody in Lineville and Corydon, Iowa, Guthrie and Tecumseh, Oklahoma, and Lansing, Kansas.

Cravens was married to a Missouri girl and worked as a farmhand for a time, but he was arrested under an alias for stealing hogs, and when his true identity was revealed, charges were brought against him. He was given a life sentence, although he won parole as an old man.

Ed Crawford

Crawford's major notoriety came while he was a member of the Ellsworth police force. Temporarily off the force the day Sheriff C. B. Whitney was shot by Billy Thompson, he was reappointed after Mayor Jim Miller angrily fired all of the officers. While wearing a badge, he killed Texan Cad Pierce (who had been a participant in the monte game which precipitated Whitney's death) and then again was fired a week later. Within three months he was shot and killed in an Ellsworth whorehouse, supposedly in revenge for killing Pierce.

Florentino Cruz

Cruz was a halfblood who was involved with cattle rustlers and stage robbers in the Tombstone area. He was associated with Ike Clanton, Curly Bill Brocius, Pete Spence, Frank Stilwell, and other archenemies of the Earp brothers. Cruz was one of five men who killed Morgan Earp, and he subsequently was chased down and shot to death by the Earp faction.

Samuel M. Cummings ("Doc")

Doc Cummings was a close friend and brother-in-law of Texas gunman Dallas Stoudenmire, having married his sister in 1870 in Columbus, Texas. Perhaps because of his association with hard cases, or perhaps because of his own irascible nature, Cummings was involved in numerous altercations, some of which erupted into shooting scrapes. At various times Cummings was a hotel owner in San Marcial, New Mexico, a justice of the peace in Oldham County, Texas, a sheep raiser in West Texas, and the owner of various restaurants in El Paso. But his inclination to become embroiled in trouble caused his death in a gunfight in 1882, just one week after he had pinned on a deputy's badge.

Roy Daugherty ("Arkansas Tom Jones")

Daugherty was raised in Missouri in a highly religious atmosphere; his father was deeply devout, and his two brothers became preachers. But Roy rebelled against his family and ran away from home at fourteen. Calling himself "Tom Jones," he claimed that he was from Arkansas (thus his nickname) and hired on at an Oklahoma ranch. He eventually decided to get his money the easy way, and in the 1890's he joined Bill Doolin's gang of bank robbers. He was captured after the shootout at Ingalls, convicted of manslaughter, and sentenced to a fifty-year prison term.

Largely through the efforts of his brothers Roy obtained a parole in 1910. After running a restaurant in Drumright, Oklahoma, for two years, he went to Hollywood to act in Westerns. Later he returned to Missouri, and in 1917 he helped rob a bank in Neosho. He was again imprisoned, but in 1921 he was released. He immediately became involved in a bank holdup in Asbury, Missouri, and for three years he was a wanted man. In 1924, however, he was apprehended in Joplin and was shot to death while resisting arrest.

Lewis S. Delony

Delony's father was an adventurer who was an early member of the Texas Rangers and who fought in the Mexican War and the Civil War. He later settled down to become a schoolteacher, a sheepman, and the surveyor and tax assessor for DeWitt County, which was the center of the violent Sutton and Taylor feud. By the age of twelve young Delony had acquired the habit of carrying a derringer to school, and within two years the self-reliant youth was in Louisiana and Mississippi, working at a variety of jobs. He soon returned to Clinton, his birthplace, where he became a store clerk, assistant postmaster, and deputy sheriff.

In 1877 and on several occasions thereafter Delony received a temporary appointment as a Texas Ranger, and for a time he served as a border guard in Laredo, engaging in several skirmishes with smugglers. Delony married in 1887 and entered a variety of business ventures in different Texas towns, but he continued to accept employment as a lawman from time to time, and he occasionally found himself involved in shooting scrapes.

Les Dow

Dow was a Texan who drifted into New Mexico and after running a saloon and hotel became a deputy sheriff of Chaves County. Later he was a range detective and a cattle inspector for the Texas and New Mexico Sanitary Association, and for a time he served as sheriff of Eddy County and held a commission as a deputy U.S. marshal. Eventually he ran afoul of a Texas hard case named Dave Kemp, who shot him to death in 1897.

Jack Dunlap ("Three-Fingered Jack")

Dunlap was a notorious Arizona outlaw about the turn of the century. Captured in 1895, he soon was loose again, and he joined the bandit gang of Black Jack Christian. Later Dunlap became involved with the Burt Alvord-Billy Stiles band of train robbers.

William B. Dunn

Dunn and his brothers - Bee, Calvin, Dal, and George - ran a road ranch near Ingalls, Oklahoma, where travelers ate and slept. Prosperous, solitary voyagers often were robbed and murdered there, according to hearsay, and in 1895 two members of the Doolin gang were killed at the ranch. The Dunn brothers helped law officers track down outlaws from time to time, and Bill Dunn fired the shotgun blast which finished off Bill Doolin. Dunn also owned a meat market in Pawnee through which he and cc,-owner Chris Bolton disposed of stolen cattle. Charged with theft, Dunn directed his animosity toward lawman Frank Canton, who considered the fugitive "a dead shot, and . . . the quickest man with a revolver that I ever met." But Dunn apparently was not quick enough, because when he and Canton met in Pawnee,the peace officer whipped out his pistol and shot Dunn to death.

Bill Earhart

Reared in Jack County, Texas, Earhart came to New Mexico in 1883 with his friends Jim and Clay Cooper. Five years later, while directing a roundup on the Cooper ranch in the Tularosa country, he fell into a dispute with a rugged cattleman named John Good and thereby became involved in a range war directed against the bullying rancher. Later, Earhart returned to Texas, where he was killed in 1896.

Joe Elliott

Elliott's chief notoriety as a gunman came during the Johnson County War of the 1890's. Elliott was a range detective and stock inspector for the Wyoming Cattle Growers' Association, and he fought vigorously for the interests of the cattle barons. Elliott was banished from Wyoming in the aftermath of the conflict, and despite his threats to come back and kill his enemies, he did not return.

Tranquellano Estabo

Within a few months in 1895 this notorious Mexican outlaw was involved in three gunfights. Near Phoenix, N.M., Tranquellano Estabo and some friends got into a fight with Walter Paddleford and some other men. Three of the Mexicans were killed in the shootout, but Estabo escaped unhurt. A few months later, after mortally wounding a man during a card game in a Phoenix saloon, Estabo went into the street and began shooting his pistols. When ordered to stop by Sheriff Dee Harkey and his assistant Cicero Stewart, Estabo replied with gunfire. When Estabo jumped on his horse and tried to escape, Harkey gave chase. Three miles out of town. Estabo was forced to surrender. The frightened gunman was returned to town where he was nearly killed by Stewart. Estabo's life was spared and he was put in jail to await trial.

Chris Evans

Evans was a Californian who owned a farm near the mine of George and John Sontag, a pair of train robbers. In 1892 Evans helped the Sontag brothers escape from a posse, and after George was captured, Evans teamed up with John in stopping stagecoaches. They claimed that they were searching for lawmen to kill, but they seemed to have no compunctions against seizing whatever loot was available.

The manhunt continued for nine months, and the two fugitives shot their way out of trap after trap, wounding seven deputies in the process. When they were finally apprehended, John was killed, and Evans, once he recovered from his wounds, was sentenced to life in prison. On December 3, 1893, he managed to escape, but he was recaptured the following February and was returned to his cell.

Jesse Evans

Evans left his Missouri home at an early age, was employed as a cowboy in Lampasas County, Texas, and then in 1872 migrated to New Mexico and soon found work on John Chisum's spread. Within a few years he turned to outlawry, robbing stores and isolated camps and organizing a band of rustlers which included, at various times, Billy the Kid, Tom Hill, Frank Baker, and numerous other ruffians. Evans was briefly jailed, and he was constantly under indictment. He became an early member of the Murphy-Dolan faction in the Lincoln County War. The country soon became too hot for him, however, and he shifted his rustling activities to Southwest Texas. In 1880 he killed a Texas Ranger-during a general shootout, and he was sentenced to ten years in the penitentiary. He escaped from a work gang in May, 1882, and tereafter disappeared from verifiable history.

George W. Flatt

A native of Tennessee, Flatt achieved notoriety as a two-gun lawman in Caldwell, Kansas. Although he was alleged to have killed on previous occasions, Flatt's reputation as a gunman was established in Caldwell in 1879. Shortly afterward Flatt and William Horseman opened an "elegant saloon" adjacent to Caldwell's City Hotel. That same summer Flatt became Caldwell's first city marshal, but the next year he was replaced by Horseman.

Flatt next became a range detective, and during this same period he married an eighteen-year-old girl named Fanny. In June, 1880, Flatt was gunned down in the streets of Caldwell, and four days later Fanny Flatt gave birth to a son. William Horseman was suspected and tried for Flatt's murder, but he was acquitted, and the murderer was never brought to justice.

Robert Ford

Bob Ford moved with his family to a farm in Ray County, Missouri, in 1879. His older brother, Charlie, soon became involved with the James gang in train holdups, and although Bob apparently was not a professional robber, he regularly consorted with outlaws. In 1882 he and Dick Liddell killed Wood Hite in a gunfight in the home of Ford's sister, and a few months later Bob murdered Jesse James for the reward money. He was then tried and convicted of murder in the death of Hite, but Governor T. T. Crittendon gave him a full pardon because he had rid the state of James.

For a time Bob returned to his parents' home at Richmond, Missouri, but he was regarded with widespread contempt and scorn. Charlie also was met with distaste, and he committed suicide in 1884. Bob soon went on tour with a stage company, repeating the story of how he had killed Jesse James, but boos were the usual reaction. However, a chorus girl named Nellie Waterson fell in love with him, and they were married.

Ford spent the next two years in P. T. Barnum's freak show, and he began to drink and gamble heavily. Then he bought into a saloon in Las Vegas, New Mexico, but business was bad. Finally he was attracted to the Colorado boom town of Creede, where he opened a prosperous saloon in a tent. But in Creede he tangled with a hard case named Ed O. Kelly, and Kelly killed him with a shotgun. Ford was buried in Richmond.

Albert Jennings Fountain

Albert Jennings (he later added Fountain to his name) traveled abroad extensively as a youth before settling in California in the 1850's. In 1859 he became a journalist for the Sacramento Union and covered William Walker's filibustering activities in Latin America. During the Civil War, Fountain joined the First California Infantry Volunteers, and in 1862 he came to New Mexico as a member of Carleton's California Column. In Mesilla he married fourteenyear-old Mariana Perez, who eventually bore him a dozen children.

When the war ended, Fountain organized a militia company to fight Indians, and he was severely wounded in a skirmish in 1865. Soon he moved to nearby El Paso, where he became a deputy collector of customs, county surveyor, and attorney, with time out to fight in Mexico with Benito Juarez as a colonel of artillery. In 1868 he won election to the Texas Senate. Soon he was selected president of that body, and Governor E. J. Davis appointed him brigadier general of the Texas State Police. Fountain was involved in a fatal gunfight in 1870, his political career was turbulent, and in 1875 he moved back to Mesilla.

Fountain was a colorful and controversial lawyer, and at different times he served as an assistant U.S. district attorney and as a member of the New Mexico House of Representatives. On occasion he led Mexican supporters (who were derisively termed "Fountain's Greasers" by Anglos) against outlaw gangs and marauding Apaches.

In the late 1880's Fountain began a bitter power struggle with Albert B. Fall, who in time became secretary of the interior and a key villain in the notorious Teapot Dome scandal. Fountain and Fall first duelled through opposing newspapers, but soon the feud grew violent. In 18)6 Fountain and his youngest child, nine-year-old Henry, were killed in the White Sands while returning to Mesilla, creating one of the great mysteries of the Southwest. Their bodies disappeared, an extensive manhunt and subsequent court proceedings failed to reveal the killers, and the subject remained obscure and dangerous to discuss.

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