A Close Shave for the Barber of Dodge City

On the face of it, it is puzzling why these prominent merchants and officials, all of European heritage, would champion a black ex-slave who had admitted to killing a white man, even though he entered a not guilty plea to the charge of murder, claiming mistaken identity. Certainly, mid-century Kansas contained a strong abolitionist element. And the spirit of the Western frontier—the sense of equality and interdependence regardless of color, class or creed fostered among pioneers—tended to lessen instances of friction due to bigotry. Yet Kansans were not unique among Americans, and given a strong enough impulse, which murder surely was, violence across the color line proved to be the rule rather than the exception nationwide.

The explanation for why John Tyler’s bondsmen were willing to put up $1,000 they knew they might very well forfeit—his chances for acquittal were not hopeful and the sensible choice for him was to cut and run—emerges from the circumstances of Dodge City itself. In part there was a struggle for power between cliques with different visions for its future—an essential struggle to give it a future, to keep it from dying, vanishing, being swept away by the harsh prairie winds, a fate that befell more than one ghost town on the high plains west of Wichita.

While the “better class” would not recognize Tyler as one of their own socially, they embraced him when it came to business affairs. In their eyes he was an honest businessman harried by the jackal element of town, particularly the Sweeneys— a situation in which any one of them could easily imagine himself. An assessment done in July 1875 lists the following properties on Merchants’ Row, Block 4 of North Front Street: Beatty & Kelley’s saloon and restaurant; Jacob Collar’s dry goods and furniture mart; A.J. Peacock’s billiard hall; John Tyler’s barbershop; Morris Collar’s clothing store; George Hoover’s wholesale liquors; and the two-story brick building of outfitters Charles Rath and Robert Wright. By and large, these men and those who put up Tyler’s bond were in Dodge for the long haul, desiring a stable and secure town. But in the summer of 1876, as Tyler’s case first came before the District Court, security and stability were uncertain.

Though no issues of the Dodge City newspaper, the Times, survive from that summer, correspondence from the now bustling cattle emporium was printed in other papers throughout the state. The July 27, 1876, issue of the Star, published in Ellis County, the former home of many prominent Dodgeites, described a mass meeting of 150 men held to select delegates from Ford County to the state congressional and senatorial conventions. According to the correspondent, “For downright lawlessness and violence the convention exceeded anything I ever saw or heard of….The best citizens of the city made up a slate and determined to elect every delegate thereon if within their power.” The “best citizens” were the businessmen who ran stable enterprises that did not depend for their existence on the transient cowboys who were flooding the town, replacing buffalo hunters and the soldiers from Fort Dodge as prime targets for exploitation. Those opposed to the businessmen were “the gamblers, drunkards, etc,” in other words, the exploiters, the sporting class, which also counted con men, pimps and prostitutes.

Speaking for the businessmen was Richard W. Evans, a stock raiser who had come from Hays City, known as “a Dodge in miniature,” the seat of Ellis County 100 miles to the north and a shipping point for cattle along the Kansas Pacific line. Before he could speak, though, Evans had to beat back an attempt to run him off the floor by a jeering, pushing, pulsating mob. With chaos swirling around him, he leaped onto a table at the front of the meeting hall and shouted above the din that he and his supporters would accept the mob’s choice of chairman, Harry T. McCarty, if there was agreement that each side would appoint one teller to count votes. This bold stroke quieted the hooligans while assuring a fair tally.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to