Deacon Jim Miller: Killing in Deacon’s Clothing

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‘OH, GOD!’ cried Gus Bobbitt, when the shotgun roared out of the twilight gloom. His body lurched erect on the wagon seat as buckshot tore into his legs. Then the shotgun boomed again from behind an elm, its load tearing into Bobbitt’s left side. The cattleman toppled from his wagon into the pasture below, and his panicked team ran away into the night.

Behind Bobbitt, his neighbor Bob Ferguson jumped from his own wagon to take cover. But there was no more shooting, only the clatter of hooves as a horseman broke out of the thicket from where the fire had come. Ferguson was sure he knew the rider. He couldn’t say the gunman’s name, maybe, for the killer was a stranger, but Ferguson knew him as the same man who had passed Bobbitt and Ferguson on the trail just moments before. He had even greeted Bobbitt, although he had partially obscured his face with a rag, as if he had something in his eye. He had been riding a scruffy brown mare, and behind his saddle had been something wrapped in what looked like a folded slicker.

It was a shotgun, trademark and favorite weapon of one of the Old West’s best-known professional killers, James B. Miller, commonly known as ‘Deacon Jim,’ from his favorite dress of black broadcloth and his pious pretense of church-going respectability. Men also called him ‘Killin’ Jim,’ in reference to his chosen vocation, murder for hire.

Deacon Jim was precocious in the ways of violent death. Born in Arkansas in 1866, he was orphaned early and sent to live with his grandparents in Coryell County, Texas. When Miller was 8, his grandparents were murdered, and the boy was arrested for the crime. Never tried, he was sent to live with his sister and brother-in-law, John Coop. Ten years later, in July 1884, a shotgun blast killed John Coop as he slept on his front porch early one evening. His murderer galloped off into the night.

That time, 17-year-old Miller was tried and convicted. In addition to his well-known vile temper and hatred of Coop, there was substantial evidence of careful planning. It was enough to override Miller’s alibi that he had been at a camp meeting that evening. His major witness, a young lady, failed him, admitting at his trial that Miller had left her and ‘did not return until the regular service was over and the shouting commenced.’ Miller was sentenced to life, but his conviction was overturned on appeal, and the case was never retried.

Miller then wandered into San Saba County and immediately began to run with bad company. After being disarmed and arrested by Dee Harkey, later one of the most famous lawmen the West ever produced, Miller drifted into McCulloch County, where he raced horses and punched cows for Emmanuel (’Mannen’) Clements, Sr., one of the four murderous Clements brothers of Taylor-Sutton feud fame.

Clements was a violent man and had killed at least a couple of men himself. He was also cousin to deadly John Wesley Hardin and had personally helped Hardin to break out of jail in the fall of 1872. Miller got to know Little Mannen, Clements’ equally violent son, and Sallie, the pretty daughter of the family.

In 1887, Mannen Clements was killed in a Ballinger, Texas, saloon by City Marshal Joe Townsend. Not long afterward, Townsend, riding home at night, was swept from the saddle by a shotgun fired out of the dark. The ambusher was never identified, but Miller was widely suspected. Townsend lost an arm but survived, and Miller left the county at a high lope.

Miller drifted through southeast New Mexico and the Mexican border area, and little is known of his activities for the next couple of years. He would later brag, however, of having ‘lost my notch stick on Mexicans that I killed out on the border.’ In 1891, he rode into Pecos, Texas, a raw, tough town just beginning to acquire a little civilization. Its population, it was said, spent its time ‘making a living, going to church, picnics, engaging in a friendly drink now and then, praying three times a day and fist-fighting twice a week.’

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