At 6:30 on the foggy morning of July 18, 1901, 14-year-old Willie Nickell was brutally killed — shot in the back from ambush as he rode his father’s horse near the family homestead 40 miles northwest of Cheyenne, Wyoming. The subsequent investigation and the arrest, trial and execution of the suspected murderer touched off controversy that has persisted for more than 100 years.

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The central figure in that controversy is Tom Horn, a well-known stock detective who previously had been implicated in the murders of four rustlers in Wyoming and Colorado before being hanged for a crime that many historians believe he did not commit — even though Horn had claimed, ‘Killing men is my specialty. I look at it as a business proposition, and I think I have a corner on the market. ‘ This from a man who was otherwise intelligent, sensitive and religious.

During the coroner’s inquest following the shooting, speculation arose that Willie’s killer had actually been gunning for the boy’s father, Kels Nickell, a troublemaker and sometime sheepman who had earned the enmity of local cattlemen, including John Coble, Horn’s employer at the time of the Nickell murder. On August 4, the theory that Kels Nickell had been the intended target gained credence; he was shot and wounded — but not critically — after his sheep trespassed onto a neighboring ranch.

After a lengthy investigation, which included the extraction of an alleged confession from Horn by use of a concealed stenographer, the suspect was arrested on January 24, 1902, and was subsequently tried, convicted and, on November 20, 1903, hanged for the crime. But the question of his guilt or innocence and the enigma of the man’s personality remain.

A continuing interest in Tom Horn centers on his puzzling nice guy/nasty guy personality, his shadowy nature and the forces that drove him. Further complicating the issue is the historical context in which he operated. He was a transitional figure who somehow seemed unable to step from the 19th into the 20th century. He was, perhaps, a figure who did not want to take that step.

Psycho-history itself is controversial — it is hard enough to understand the psychology of contemporary people, much less the mindset of an obscure character from a century ago. Yet Tom Horn’s formative years do offer insights into what produced this fascinating character of the Old West.

Horn was born November 21, 1860, in northeast Missouri, into a bilingual and apparently dysfunctional family of German descent. He was the fourth of eight children who survived childhood, and he had one older brother and two older sisters. His father, whose name was also Tom, had moved from Ohio in the 1840s. He was known to be an industrious, capable farmer and trader who kept his family’s affairs private.

In his autobiography, Horn devoted a chapter to his childhood and told of his family’s fundamentalist religion and the ‘regular thumpings’ delivered by his father and occasional whippings by his mother. In these two elements, the strong religious beliefs and beatings, may lie the major forces that molded his personality.

The strong religious environment of his childhood produced a means to justify, by his own interpretation, the deeds he committed. Eliminating a rustler amounted to rubbing out a manifestation of evil — ‘thou shalt not steal.’ And Horn’s proficiency in this activity quickly become legendary.

The beatings his father administered, the second major component of his psyche, created a feeling of helplessness and produced a deep-seated rage. On a profound level, he may have thought that when he pulled the trigger, he was ridding the world of a child-beater.

He wrote that the farmwork left him short of time for things that were more important — fishing, tracking, hunting, and raiding bees’ nests in the company of his only friend, his dog, Shedrick. There is little doubt that shirking his responsibilities created resentment in his brothers and father and that he paid a penalty for it.

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