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Newton, Wichita, Abilene and Dodge City were tough Kansas cow towns but none was tougher than Ellsworth, Abilene’s successor as America’s biggest stock shipping center. All these cattle communities had their share of notorious gunmen, but Ellsworth featured British-born Ben Thompson, who lawman Bat Masterson described as the most dangerous killer in the West.

Ellsworth was a violent place long before it was surveyed in 1867. It grew up around Fort Harker, where a ford on the military road from Fort Riley to Fort Zarah crossed the Smoky Hill River. Even before Fort Harker was erected in 1865, the area was teaming with bullwhackers, soldiers, Army scouts and buffalo hunters, not to mention Cheyennes and, sometimes, pro-slavery raiders. Probably the first local victim of Indians was Dutch Bill, scalped by Pawnees at absurdly named Pussy Cat Creek. At least once, the whole population fled to safer Salina. Real statistics are unavailable, but it is believed that Ellsworth had eight homicides in 1868, its first year as an incorporated village.

In 1872 Abilene told Texas cattlemen that they were no longer welcome, because of tick fever and the unruly conduct of Chisholm Trail cowboys. Agents like Abel “ Shanghai ” Pierce went down the trail to urge drovers to turn their herds toward Ellsworth, 60 mile southwest of Abilene. In 1871, while in competition with Abilene, Ellsworth had attracted between 28,000 and 30,000 cattle. The next year, 220,000 Texas Longhorns came up the Chisholm Trail to Ellsworth. Actually they traveled on a new route surveyed by a Kansas Pacific Railway Co. team headed by William M. Cox, general livestock agent for the railroad. This route, which saved about 35 miles, left the original trail in Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma ) halfway between the Salt Fork of the Arkansas River and Pond Creek and crossed the Arkansas River at Ellinwood, Kan. Sometimes called Cox’s Trail or the Ellsworth Trail, it is usually considered part (a middle branch) of the Chisholm Trail.

In 1867 a Kansas law had established a quarantine line, east of which no Texas steers were allowed. Ellsworth thought itself safe, but it was actually a few miles on the wrong side of the line. However, town promoters assured Texans that they would be exempt from the law. This proved to be the case, but mainly because the law was not enforced. Locals said that it was violated daily.

Boasting the biggest stockyards and six cattle chutes on a Kansas Pacific Railroad siding, Ellsworth attracted more than cattle and cowboys. It was a magnet, or a lodestar, for an army of ruffians. Foremost among them was Ben Thompson, who was born in Yorkshire in 1842 and migrated to the United States in 1851. He was 18 when he shot to death his first victim; he then killed another man in a New Orleans knife fight. While serving in the Confederate Army, he killed a fellow Confederate soldier. He was later jailed in Austin for killing his own brother-in-law, who had been abusing Ben’s sister. Before arriving in Ellsworth, Thompson and Phil Coe ran the Bull’s Head Saloon in Abilene, where, in 1871, Marshal Wild Bill Hickok shot Coe dead.

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