Dodge City, Kan., shown here in 1882, was a rambunctious cow town when stage performer Dora Hand hit the scene. She would never leave. (Kansas State Historical Society)

Wyatt gave Spike the bad news, that the bullet intended for the mayor had instead killed Dora Hand. Kenedy took out his rage on the rifle-toting Masterson, telling him, ‘You ought to have made a better shot than you did!’ Bat replied, ‘I did the best I could.’

How does a cowboy from the Texas Panhandle kill the most popular woman in a Kansas cow town and not hang for the offense? The cowboy was Spike Kenedy. The woman was Dora Hand. And the town was Dodge City. It happened in the fall of 1878. The strange fate that brought these two people together in a tragic shooting incident is by itself a fascinating frontier tale. Adding dash to the drama is the fact that Mayor James H. “Dog” Kelley was unwittingly involved, and four of Dodge City’s legendary lawmen—Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Charlie Bassett and Bill Tilghman—had a hand in chasing and apprehending the killer.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in Wild West magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

In 1878 Dodge was a cattle-trading and -shipping center with a reputation for mayhem, especially when Texas drovers hit town to shake off the trail dust. Sober citizens had begun to temper Dodge’s rowdy reputation. But the famous lawmen of Dodge and Ford County could only do so much to control the hard-drinking cowboys and gamblers. On April 9, Texas cowboys killed Bat’s brother Ed Masterson, the town marshal. Still, by fall Dodge seemed to be settling down. Then, on October 4, things heated up again when a kind and refined lady of the stage was shot in her sleep.

In October 1878, James “Spike” Kenedy was a dark and handsome 23-year-old who favored his Mexican mother, Petra. He was also the willful and wayward son of Mifflin Kenedy, a stern former ship’s captain and Pennsylvania Quaker who had come west to seek his fortune. For a while, Mifflin had partnered with Richard King in the King Ranch, one of Texas’ largest spreads. When the partnership dissolved in 1868, Kenedy purchased Laureles Ranch, a 172,000-acre tract 23 miles from Corpus Christi. Both King and Kenedy contributed much to the economy of Dodge City. In 1878 alone their cowboys drove 15,000 Longhorns to Dodge, “Queen of the Cow Towns.”

In contemporary accounts, Spike Kenedy is described as a half-breed, and short shrift is given his mother. Petra Vela de Vidal Kenedy, in fact, was the daughter of Gregorio Vela, a onetime provincial governor of Mexico under Spanish rule. Petra had married Mexican army Colonel Luis Vidal and was already a 26-year-old widow when she married Mifflin Kenedy on April 16, 1852. She was beautiful, intelligent and a devout Catholic. She bore Vidal five children and Mifflin six, including Spike, Mifflin’s second oldest son. Henry F. Hoyt, a doctor who knew young Spike, wrote of him, “With his athletic physique, dark hair and eyes, he was the handsomest bachelor in the panhandle.”

The young Kenedy shared neither his mother’s devotion to the Catholic Church nor his father’s strict Quaker leanings. According to Bat Masterson biographer Robert DeArment, “[Spike] liked whiskey, whooping and whoring, and as heir to the Kenedy fortune, he considered himself immune to arrest by cow-town marshals.” At Ellsworth, Kan., on July 20, 1872, Spike had an altercation at a poker table with the well-known gunfighter Print Olive, and both men suffered gunshot wounds. By reaching into his pockets, Mifflin Kenedy managed to get his son off the hook in Ellsworth, but Spike didn’t learn any valuable lessons.

During much of the 1870s, DeArment says, Spike hung around Tascosa, Texas. Hoping to make a man of his unruly son, Mifflin Kenedy established him in the panhandle with 2,000 cattle and a crew of herders. At first it seemed to work. But Spike would revert to his wild ways whenever he set foot in Dodge City, where, according to one acquaintance, he “was unable to withstand the temptations of the underworld.” He was quite a contrast to Dora Hand, the refined lady who managed to take the “Wickedest City in the West” by storm.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to