Deacon Jim Miller: Killing in Deacon’s Clothing

 | Wild West  | 0 comments  | Print This Post  | Email This Post

In February, however, Garrett agreed to go to Las Cruces to talk to Deacon Jim. He traveled with Brazel and a man named Carl Adamson, to whom, in the Western spirit, he had extended hospitality the night before his trip. In spite of his wife’s apprehensions about his journey, Garrett carried no side arm, only a folding shotgun tucked away in its case in his buggy. He obviously did not connect cattleman Miller with the deadly Deacon Jim. After all, Garrett was pushing 60 and had not been an active lawman for years.

Garrett should have listened to his wife. Along the trail to Las Cruces, suspecting nothing, he stopped his rig to answer a call of nature. While he was doing so, a bullet tore through the back of his head and another lodged in his stomach. He died quickly, and the other two men drove into Las Cruces. Their story was that Brazel had killed Garrett with his revolver in self-defense after another argument about goats on cattle range.

The Las Cruces sheriff, a perceptive lawman named Lucero, smelled a rat. He found Garrett still lying in the road, his shotgun beside him. But the famous sheriff’s fly was still unbuttoned, and his right hand was still encased in a heavy glove, hardly the garb of an experienced gunfighter getting ready to attack someone. Lucero concluded that Garrett’s shotgun, loaded only with birdshot, had been placed near the body after he was killed.

The killing emitted an even stronger smell after a mounted police officer, prowling the off-road brush near the killing site, found horse droppings and two spent Winchester shells near the spot where Garrett was killed. The same officer knew Deacon Jim’s record and discovered he was related to Adamson.

It didn’t matter. Brazel was acquitted, and Miller was never arrested. He went back to Fort Worth to continue his gambling and real estate speculations.

Toward the end of 1908, Killin’ Jim’s friend and brother-in-law, Little Mannen Clements, died in a saloon fight in El Paso. Good riddance, honest people said, but Miller was determined to seek revenge. First, however, there was another matter of business to attend to. He had been offered another contract. This time it was no unsung nester or humble sheepman, or even a famous sheriff, but the biggest payday of his career. It was a prominent man, a pillar of his community of Ada, Okla. The blood price was $2,000, the richest prize of Deacon Jim’s ugly career. Vengeance would have to wait. Deacon Jim rode north.

Ada was a bustling young town, named for a daughter of one of the founding families and policed effectively by the twin Colts of a skinny shrimp of a marshal named Nestor. By the time Miller rode into Ada, the town was the growing center of a thriving cotton trade, a city on the way up.

It was also a very tough place, in or near which 36 people had been murdered in 1908 alone. It was home to a bitter quarrel between unscrupulous saloon operators Jesse West and Joe C. Allen and a hard-nosed businessman and sometime-lawman named Allen Augustus ‘Gus’ Bobbitt. Ada thought the worst of the feud was over by now. Bobbitt’s rivals had left the area to run cattle in Texas, but they had not forgotten Bobbitt, after all.

Instead, they had hired Jim Miller, the suave and courteous angel of death, who rode north early in 1909. And so it was that Gus Bobbitt drove his wagon back from town that winter night, and that terrible scattergun tore the life out of him at the gate to his own field. Bobbitt lived about an hour, lying with his head in his wife’s lap. Tough and clear-headed to the end, he told her how to dispose of his property, including $1,000 as a reward for the man who killed him.

A posse immediately set off to run down Bobbitt’s killer. This time, perhaps arrogant from long immunity, Miller had not covered his trail well. The townsmen found his horse at the home of someone named Williamson. Beaten and cowed by a crowd of angry men, Williamson spilled the beans.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to

Tags: Historical Figures, People, The Wild West, Wild West