A Close Shave for the Barber of Dodge City

The killing was remarkable, less for what it said about the jealous husband and the innocent victim than about the growing pains of the turbulent town. It occurred on a night of brutal cold, of wolf winds searching the Kansas prairie for prey. On January 14, 1876, a man named Uriah T. Lawrence left one of the establishments strung along Dodge City’s Front Street. The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad tracks dividing Front were known locally as the “Deadline” and separated the wild, uncivilized, anything-goes south side of town from the respectable if not entirely teetotaling north. Perhaps it was from one of the sedate north-side saloons—the description is relative—that Lawrence took his leave into the bracing night air.

A contemporary account of what happened next relates that he was taking a shortcut home. He may have been heeding a call of nature as well, since the saloons planted their outhouses to the rear of the Front Street premises, near a bypath of “female boarding houses” known officially as Chestnut Street and unofficially as Tin Pot Alley, from the habit merchants had of chucking their battered utensils into it.

Whatever Lawrence’s intentions, he had not walked far, not so far as the length of a block, when a flash split the dark and 18 buckshot ripped into his left groin. It would be comforting to report the shock of the concussion rendered the 25-year-old farmer insensible to his fate, bringing with it an instant, painless passage from life to death, but such was not to be. Information filed in the case states that he “did languish” for five whole days, until January 19, when he died of his wounds.

Nobody doubted who the midnight assassin was or what motive impelled him to touch off his double-barreled shotgun. John Tyler, a former slave from Missouri and the owner of a barbershop and residence on Front Street, readily confessed. His motive was one with which his past had made him all too familiar: property rights, the property being his wife, Malvina. The intended victim was not Lawrence but a mulatto bootblack, Allen E. Brice, who lived with the Tylers. According to local gossip, Brice was a paramour of Malvina Tyler, sharing bed as well as board.

Having uttered public threats, Tyler had armed himself and lain in wait for his rival, sure that Brice would come tomcatting around the rear of the household. Blinded by pent-up hatred, the barber snapped the trigger before realizing his target, soft-footing through the rubbish, was the shadowy outline of the white man, Lawrence. Surprisingly, for several weeks after the remains had been consigned to Boot Hill, no one—officers of the law, vigilantes or a garden-variety mob—was inclined to take action against Tyler. It appeared that the citizens of Dodge City, already bogeymen to the prim burghers of Middle America for their heedless, heathen and widely reported disregard of human life, were about to live up—or down—to their reputation.

In January 1876, the local legal situation was unsettled. Though the A.T. & S.F. Railroad had laid tracks as far west as Dodge by September 5, 1872, the city was not incorporated for another three years. Until 1875 law enforcement was in the hands of the county sheriff, and even with the November election of two constables (one of whom was the owner of a dance hall and brothel) to serve Dodge City and Township, the only available jail was under the jurisdiction of the sheriff, and he had to patrol not only Ford County, where Dodge was located, but also a number of unorganized counties to the south and west that were havens for horse and cattle thieves. It would not be until April 1876 that Dodge would elect a mayor, a city council and a marshal to head up its own police force.

But with a lucrative cattle trade looming on the horizon, the “better class” of citizens—as permanent residents liked to think of themselves in opposition to itinerants such as buffalo hunters, gamblers and prostitutes—discovered a motive in cold, hard cash to dispel Dodge’s reputation as a camp full of wanton murderers, and the mechanism of the law cranked up after some initial sputtering. That Tyler made no attempt to flee following the shooting of Lawrence is evident. On February 8, the justice of the peace for Dodge Township, William Y. McIntosh, issued a warrant for his arrest, and on the same day, Ford County Undersheriff Ed O. Hougue brought the prisoner before the bench. Tyler pled not guilty. The justice fixed his recognizance at $750, to appear at the June term of the Ford County District Court, and Tyler produced the sureties to cover his bond, thus avoiding incarceration.