A Close Shave for the Barber of Dodge City

Those who hastened to bail Tyler out were a trio of dubious repute. Edward D. Cowen, living in Dodge at the time, would become a reporter in Colorado in the 1880s. Along with Bat Masterson and others, he would successfully pressure the governor of Colorado to keep Doc Holliday out of the clutches of the Arizona Territory authorities that sought to prosecute the deadly dentist in the aftermath of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Cowen himself was no stranger to violence. His loose tongue once provoked his near-fatal beating at the hands of a Leadville, Colo., alderman. William F. Sweeney had been Ford County clerk since 1873 and was associated with the political power structure known as the “Ring.” Sweeney’s wife of the moment, Bessie—she went through three husbands in as many years—had a reputation as a woman of easy virtue and was a con artist, a self-described “clairvoyant,” sporting the cognomen Mrs. Dr. Guy.

The Sweeneys and Cowen set upon the desperate and illiterate Tyler, who had no personal property to speak of, and gulled him into signing a deed of conveyance to his Front Street barbershop, disguising it as a simple IOU. With the prospects of Dodge soaring on the wings of the fledgling cattle trade, this shop, located on the north side of the street between a billiard hall and a drugstore, was prime real estate, sure to appreciate many times over. Two months later, May 13, a formal indictment was handed down against Tyler. About this time, the Sweeneys and Cowen took possession of the shop, and the full realization of his predicament broke upon the barber. Not only was he due to face a murder charge in District Court in less than a month, he had also signed away the only equity available to him to hire a defense lawyer.

In addition, as a black man whose victim, albeit accidental, was white, he had to be acutely aware that vigilantism was not unknown in Ford County. A recent victim of mob law, the son of a respected clergyman, had been accused of horse theft and strung up on Sawlog Creek, 14 miles south of Dodge. In 1876 the frontier code of swift justice still coexisted with the legal efforts of town and county police such as Charles Bassett, Bat Masterson and Wyatt and Morgan Earp.

Tyler seized the only option open to him if he was determined to stand his ground. On May 31 he broke into the barberhop and took possession of it, running Sweeney off by force, and no one, it seems, stepped forward to oppose him. There may have been several reasons why.

First, the Sweeneys were not upstanding citizens. Bessie’s shenanigans in the town were no secret, and William Sweeney was tainted by long association with county commissioners often seen as corrupt and self-serving. In January 1876, an Atchison, Kan., newspaper reported the Ford County commissioners had issued bonds in the amount of $8,000 to build a bridge across the Cimarron River in Seward County—a swath of wilderness attached to Ford as a municipal township—where no bridge was needed and there was no one to pay interest or principal on the bonds.

The chairman of the county commission, Alfred J. Peacock—incidentally, the owner of the billiard hall next to John Tyler’s barbershop—signed the bonds, and William F. Sweeney, the county clerk, certified them. However, the state auditor received an objection to the proceedings and issued an injunction. The case was to come up for a hearing. The newspaper concluded: “The bonds will not be registered. Nobody will be swindled this time. A thin scheme has been nipped.”

Second, some of the leading citizens of Dodge rallied to lend their support to Tyler. More than moral support, it was financial and with no strings attached and no nefarious schemes afoot. When Tyler came before Judge Samuel R. Peters on June 27, 1876, his new group of bondsmen represented power points all along the grid of Dodge City. Henry L. Sitler was the first settler on the Dodge townsite in 1872 and an original member of the townsite company. George M. Hoover, a successful liquor dealer and mayor, had been on hand to greet the Santa Fe railroad contractors when they arrived in June 1872, selling his liquid fire from a tent saloon, his plank bar held up by stacked strips of prairie sod. George Cox was a Georgian who had served in the Confederate Army, moved west and built the Dodge House, the premier hotel in town. Sam Galland, a doctor, and Jacob Collar, a dry goods merchant, had both emigrated from Germany and represented a strong foreign constituency in the county. Philander G. Reynolds ran a stagecoach operation and Ham Bell a livery stable. And perhaps the most unexpected bondsman of all was the marshal of Dodge, 300-plus-pound Lawrence E. Deger.