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The Gunfighters

Augustine Chacon A mexican bandito, had a system: After each raid on the U.S. side of the border, he would retreat to a blamless life back home. Arizona Rangers finally hauled him to justice.

Dave H. Mather ("Mysterious Dave")

Mysterious Dave was rumored to have been a descendant of Cotton Mather. His sobriquet accurately describes the true extent of knowledge about his background and final years. It is known that by 1873 this native of Connecticut was involved with rustlers in Sharp County, Arkansas. A year later he was hunting buffalo, but after suffering a stomach slash in a Dodge City knife fight he went to New Mexico, where he consorted with horse thieves and stage robbers. While in Mobeetie, near Fort Elliott in the Texas Panhandle, Mather reputedly killed a man following a quarrel.

In 1879 Mather and several other shady characters were arrested with the notorious outlaw Dutch Henry Born. Mather was soon released, but within months he was again arrested for complicity in a train robbery in the vicinity of Las Vegas. After trial he was acquitted, and almost immediately he secured an appointment as a constable in Las Vegas. For a few months he was quite active as a peace officer, but in the spring of 1880 he traveled with three other prospectors to the gold fields of Gunnison, Colorado.

By November Mather was back in Las Vegas. He helped some friends break from the city jail and then went to Texas. He was first in San Antonio, then went to Dallas and finally to Fort Worth, where he was arrested for stealing a gold ring and chain from a Negro woman.

In 1883 Mather moved to Dodge City and was appointed deputy city marshal and deputy sheriff of Ford County. There were complaints that Mysterious Dave was a bully and was too cooperative with criminals, and when he ran for city constable in February, 1884, he was defeated.

A few months later an old feud with Deputy Marshal Tom Nixon erupted into bloodshed. In June, Nixon wounded Mather in the streets of Dodge, and three days afterward Mysterious Dave shot Nixon to death. Mather eventually won acquittal and briefly turned to farming, but in May, 1885, he became involved in another fatal gunfight in Ashland, Kansas. While awaiting trial, Mather jumped bail and turned up as city marshal of New Kiowa, Kansas. In 1887 he rode into Long Pine, Nebraska, where he had occasionally worked at the depot hotel. But after a year Dave mysteriously and permanently faded into anonymity.

Jacob B. Matthews

Billy Matthews was a native of Tennessee who fought through the Civil War with Company M of the Fifth Tennessee Cavalry. After the war he drifted west, and by 1807 he had become a miner in Elizabethtown, New Mexico. In 1873 Matthews moved to Lincoln, where he served as circuit court clerk and found employment with L. G. Murphy and James J. Dolan. He eventually worked up to a partnership with Dolan and John H. Riley - just in time to become embroiled in their feud with Alexander McSween and John Tunstall.

As a deputy of Sheriff William Brady, Matthews led the posse which assassinated Tunstall. He also was a principal in the gunfight which resulted in the deaths of Brady and George Hindman. In addition, he fought in the climactic four-day shootout in Lincoln, and he was later indicted for murder in the death of lawyer H. J. Chapman.

Years after Lincoln County had settled down, Matthews moved to Roswell, where in 1898 President McKinley appointed him postmaster. He was reappointed by Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, but he died two years later.

Michael Meagher

Natives of Ireland, Meagher and his younger brother John immigrated to the United States and settled in Illinois. They fought in the Civil War, and in the late 1860's they moved into Kansas as stage drivers. In 1871 Mike was appointed marshal of Wichita, and John became his deputy. Mike consistently distinguished himself by making arrests, often in the teeth of drawn guns, without violence and by frequently preventing bloodshed.

After three years Mike left the job, went to Indian Territory, dabbled in carpentry and drove a freight wagon, then returned to law enforcement in 1874 as a deputy U.S. marshal. That same year he was appointed first lieutenant of a militia company organized to scout Indians. In 1875 Meagher was reelected marshal of Wichita, and in 1877 he was forced to kill Sylvester Powell.

As the cattle boom waned in Wichita, Meagher moved to Caldwell, gambled, opened a saloon, and was elected mayor in 1880. The next year he served a brief term as city marshal, and a few months later he was killed by Jim Talbot in the streets of Caldwell.

Bob Meldrum

Before his arrival in Wyoming in 1899, Bob Meldrum had a vague reputation as a western killer. During the early 1890's he had supposedly aided Pinkerton detective Tom Horn in chasing and gunning down two horsemen, only to discover that their victims were the wrong men. Around the turn of the century Meldrum killed a man in Dixon, Wyoming, and then drifted to Colorado, where he was hired as a strike breaker against the United Mine Workers of America in Cripple Creek.

Meldrum returned to Wyoming in 1908 and was paid $250 a month by the Snake River Cattlemen's Association to rid the area of rustlers. He was made a deputy sheriff in Routt County and in Carbon County, but by 1911 he had been relieved of his duties. He soon found employment as town marshal of Baggs, and he quickly entered into a tempestuous marriage with a local girl. After killing a well- liked cowboy early in 1912, Meldrum was sentenced to the Wyoming Penitentiary for five to seven years for voluntary manslaughter. Following his release he worked as a harness maker in Walcott, Wyoming.

John Middleton

Middleton drifted into New Mexico from Kansas sometime in the 1870's. He was described by rancher John Tunstall as "about the most desperate looking man I ever set eyes on (& that is not saying a little.) I could fancy him doing anything ruffianly that I ever heard of, that is from his appearance, but he is as mild & composed as any man can be, but his arms are never out of his reach."

Perhaps because he was a hard case, Middleton was hired by Tunstall on the eve of the Lincoln County War. He was only a short distance away when Tunstall was killed, and he was member of the posse of "Regulators" who murdered Frank Baker, Billy Morton, and William McCloskey in retribution. Middleton was one of the men who ambushed Sheriff William Brady and Deputy George Hindman for further revenge, and a short time later he was severely wounded in the shootout at Blazer's Mill.

This brush with death apparently quenched his thirst for violence: he went to Fort Sumner to recuperate, then migrated to Sun City, Kansas, where he opened a grocery store. In later years he lived in several Kansas towns and continually, and unsuccessfully, tried to wheedle money out of Tunstall's father in England. In 1885 he was busy in Oklahoma with Belle Starr, whose husband Sam was temporarily absent. But that spring Middleton was ambushed and shot to death.

Jeff Davis Milton

Jeff Milton was the youngest of ten children of the Civil War governor of Florida. His father died during the war, and Jeff was reared on the family plantation, Sylvania, near Marianna. In 1877 the sixteenyear-old boy moved to Navasota, Texas, to live with one of his sisters and work in her husband's general store. A year later Milton went west and found employment on a cattle ranch near old Fort Phantom Hill before overseeing a gang of convicts on a farm near the state penitentiary near Huntsville.

In 1880 Milton joined the Texas Rangers, serving for three years and finishing with the rank of corporal. In Fort Davis he resumed clerking in a general store, but he soon pinned on a deputy sheriff's badge with the assignment of policing nearby Murphyville (presentday Alpine). Later Milton opened a saloon in Murphyville, tying holstered pistols to posts throughout the building so that a gun would always be handy. In 1884 he drifted into New Mexico and took employment on a ranch near San Marcial, but he soon homesteaded a spread in the San Mateos and became a deputy sheriff of Socorro County. On one occasion Milton was attacked by a grizzly, but he managed to jam his sixgun into the beast's mouth and send a bullet into its brain.

Soon Milton added the capacity of range detective to his deputy's commission, and in 1885 he joined "Russell's Army," a group of volunteers who campaigned in Arizona against Apache marauders. In 1887 Milton took a job as a mounted inspector along the ArizonaMexico boundary, operating out of Tucson and becoming one of twentyfive men who controlled nine hundred miles of border. Two years later he resigned and began operating a little horse ranch near Tucson, but by 1890 he was working as a fireman for the Southern Pacific Railroad, soon earning a promotion to conductor.

In 1894 Milton was appointed chief of police of El Paso, although he left the job within a few months to become an express messenger for Wells, Fargo. A turn- of-the-century shooting scrape crippled his left arm, and at that point he began prospecting in the Sierra Madres. Soon he was attracted to the oil boom, exploring leases in Texas and in Lower California.

Finding no success in these ventures, in 1904 Milton joined the Immigration Service, assigned to stop the smuggling of Chinese aliens through Arizona and California. In 1919 he met a New York schoolteacher who had come to Arizona for her health, and they married a few months later. Shortly thereafter the Immigration Service assigned Milton to help safeguard a shipload of alien radicals being deported from the United States and sent to revolutionary Russia.

Milton did not retire until 1930, living out his old age in Tombstone, where he had a small ranch near town. He died at the age of eighty-five, and his wife scattered his ashes in the desert.

William Miner ("Old Bill")

Miner's mother was a teacher and his father a miner. When Bill was ten his father deserted the family, bequeathing only his restlessness to his son. At thirteen Bill ran away from home to become a cowboy. He worked his way west from ranch to ranch, and when he reached California he became a bullwhacker. In 1863 he made a courageous ride through Indian-infested country to deliver a message, and for a time thereafter he operated a mail service in southern California. But in 1869 he tried a stagecoach robbery, and when his horse stumbled, a posse captured him.

Sentenced to fifteen years in San Quentin, Miner won release in 1879 for good behavior. He promptly went to Colorado and teamed up with a notorious highwayman named Bill Leroy. But after several successful train and stage holdups, vigilantes were formed to catch them. Leroy was hanged, and Miner escaped only after a desperate shootout.

Miner then left the country and spent more than a year traveling in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and South America. In Turkey he joined in a venture involving the abduction of desert women and their subsequent sale as harem girls.

Back in the United States by 1880, Miner returned to robbing stagecoaches, with occasional vacations to spend his ill-gotten loot under one of a string of aliases. Late in 1881 he was caught and again sentenced to a long stretch in San Quentin.

Released in 1901, Miner seems to have gone straight for a couple of years. But in September, 1903> he held up a train near Corbett, Oregon, and then one year later he robbed a train just outside Mission Junction, British Columbia. For three years he lived off his booty, but in 1905 he stuck up another train in British Columbia. Within two months the Canadian Mounted Police caught him, and he was sentenced to life in the New Westminster Penitentiary in Victoria, B.C. In August, 1907, however, he escaped through a thirtyfive-foot tunnel and fled to the United States. In July, 1909, Miner robbed a bank in Portland, Oregon, and in February, 1911, he led four other thieves in holding up a train near White Sulphur, Georgia.

Captured after a fight with a posse, Old Bill was sentenced to life in the Georgia State Penitentiary in Milledgeville. Three times he broke out and was recaptured, and finally, after being chased down by dogs in a swamp, the sixty- six-year-old fugitive admitted, "I guess I'm getting too old for this sort of thing." He died quietly in his sleep in 1913.

John Morco ("Happy Jack")

In California, Morco, semiliterate and a drunken brawler, killed four unarmed men and fled the state. He wandered into Kansas, appearing in Ellsworth during its heyday as a railhead. Claiming to have killed a total of twelve men (the actual total of four was revealed when his estranged wife traveled to Ellsworth with a show troupe), Morco wangled an appointment to the police force. He participated in a quarrel with Ben Thompson which led to the death of Sheriff C. B. Whitney, and he was discharged, although not before he had run Texan Neil Cain (a participant in the card game which initiated the Whitney killing) out of town by threatening to shoot him. Soon thereafter Morco was killed in a gun duel with Ellsworth Policeman J. C. Brown.

Harry N. Morse

At the age of fourteen Harry Morse came from New York as an eager Forty-niner, but he soon turned to a variety of other jobs for a steadier livelihood. In 1863 Morse was elected sheriff of Alameda County, and he subsequently achieved renown as a relentless and resourceful manhunter. In 1871 he led an exhaustive search which ultimately resulted in the capture of the notorious Tiburcio Vasquez, and during the course of his career he located and killed two other vicious outlaws.

Morse retired as sheriff in 1878 and founded a detective agency in San Francisco. As a private detective his greatest coup came in 1883 when he was responsible for the arrest of the elusive stage robber Black Bart. Morse built a large home in Oakland in which to rear his family, and he engaged in a number of business interests other than his detective agency, including real estate, publishing, and mining. He died peacefully in Oakland at the age of seventy-six.

Burton Mossman ("Cap")

The son of a farmer, Burt Mossman moved with his family in 1873 to Lake City, Missouri, then three years later to a homestead in Marshall. The Mossmans moved again in 1882, this time to New Mexico, where Burt soon became a cowboy. By the age of twenty he was a ranch foreman, and soon he became manager of a big spread in Arizona. In December, 18)7, he was employed as superintendent of the twomillion-acre Hash Knife outfit, where his primary problem proved to be ridding the vast range of rustlers.

Appointed a deputy sheriff of Navajo County, Arizona, Mossman not only found time to subdue the rustlers and run the ranch, but he also was able to conduct a stagecoach line with a partner. In 1898 Mossman and three other associates built a brick opera house in Winslow, although he soon sold out for a nice profit and later built a store building in Douglas which he sold for thirteen thousand dollars. But as he began other ventures, his business career was interrupted by an appointment as the first captain of the newly created Arizona Rangers. After two of his rangers were killed, Mossman led a hardhanded effort against area outlaws, culminating in the capture and eventual execution of the vicious Augustin Chacon.

Mossman resigned in August, 1902, following a violent year in service which established him as a deadly gunman. Later he built a vast ranch in Dakota Territory, with time out in December, 1905, to become married in New York City. A son and daughter were born to the union, but after the birth of the girl in 1909, Mossman's wife died. There were numerous business and ranching ventures during the rest of his full life, which extended deeply into the twentieth century.

Lon Oden

Serving as a Texas Ranger along the Mexican border in the late 1800s Lon Oden was involved in several gun fights while in the company of ranger John Hughes. In 1889 in Shafter, Texas, Oden and Hughes were watching the entrance to an abandoned silver mine shaft when three ore thieves and Ernest St. Leon, an undercover man, appeared. All three outlaws were killed in the ensuing fight.

In 1893 Oden was traveling on assignment with Hughes and ranger Jim Putnam. The three lawmen arrested Desidario Duran at the Mexican settlement in the border town of San Antonio Colony, Texas. When the rangers spotted three more wanted men on their way out of town, Putnam guarded Duran while Oden and Hughes chased the other fugitives. Fugitive Florencio Carrasco was killed by the rangers who returned to San Antonio just in time to rescue Putnam from a threatening mob.

Tom O'Folliard

Born in Uvalde, Texas, as the son of an Irish immigrant, O'Folliard moved with his parents to Monclova, Mexico, before the Civil War. But Tom's parents soon died in a smallpox epidemic, and he was reared in Uvalde by relatives.

In 1878 the young man drifted into New Mexico, fell into bad company, stole some horses from Emil Fritz, a member of one faction in the Lincoln County War, and thus found himself entangled in the bloody feud. He quickly became friends with Billy the Kid, shot his way out of Alexander McSween's burning home with the Kid, and joined the Kid's band of rustlers.

O'Folliard and the Kid submitted to arrest together, and they also escaped custody together. For months they were active as stock thieves, ranging as far as the Texas Panhandle. During this period O'Folliard witnessed the murder in Lincoln of one-armed lawyer Huston Chapman at the hands of Jesse Evans, William Campbell, and Billy Matthews. On another occasion Pat Garrett's posse drew within three hundred yards. and after a furious chase, during which there was a heavy exchange of shots, O'Folliard outdistanced the lawmen.

Although O'Folliard's uncle, Texas Ranger Thalis Cook, tried to persuade him to surrender, O'Folliard remained a hunted fugitive until late in 1880, when he was shot and killed by Garrett's posse.

John Wallace Olinger

Olinger was a brother of Bob Olinger, who was killed by Billy the Kid in a jailbreak. Both brothers became involved in the Lincoln County War, being deputized by Sheriff George Peppin to fight against Alexander McSween's "Regulators." One month after the big four-day shootout in Lincoln, Wallace participated in a gunfight on behalf of his ranch partner, but from that point on he led a quiet existence.

Robert A. Olinger ("The Big Indian")

Bob Olinger moved with his family from Ohio to Oklahoma, then drifted into New Mexico about 1876 and obtained the position of town marshal of Seven Rivers in Lincoln County. Olinger was suspected of aiding local outlaws, and he soon turned to punching cattle for a living. Olinger also was involved in the Lincoln County War, playing a minor role as one of the besiegers of Alexander McSween's store in July, 1878. He later pinned on a badge again as one of Pat Garrett's Lincoln County deputies, and in January, 1881, he received an appointment as a deputy U.S. marshal, although months later he was arrested in Las Vegas for illegally carrying arms.

Olinger was killed by Billy the Kid during a bold jailbreak from the Lincoln courthouse. At the time of his death Olinger had completed arrangements to rent an irrigated farm for three thousand dollars per year, but he was gunned down before he could pursue those plans.

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