N.K. Boswell was a badge wearer extraordinaire in Wyoming Territory who managed to keep the peace without killing a man—or collecting too many taxes.
Resembling more a biblical prophet than a frontier lawman, Nathaniel Kimball Boswell did not fit the popular image exemplified by his more celebrated badge-toting Western contemporaries “Wild Bill” Hickok, Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp, with their handlebar or waterfall mustaches. But when Boswell died in 1921 at the ripe old age of 84, Wyoming Secretary of State William E. Chaplin called him “the most intrepid peace officer the Rocky Mountain region ever produced.” In his decades-long career N.K. Boswell served as a county sheriff, deputy U.S. marshal, city marshal, penitentiary warden and chief of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association Detective Bureau during a period when Wyoming Territory was overrun with outlaws and desperadoes. He dealt with more badmen than Hickok, Masterson and Earp combined. And the Laramie lawman did it without ever killing a man.
Born on November 4, 1836, in East Haverhill, N.H., Nathan was one of 12 children—seven boys and five girls—brought into this world by John and Lucinda Boswell. Leaving home at age 17, he went first to Michigan and then Wisconsin, where he worked as a lumberjack.
The year 1857 was an eventful one for 21-year-old Boswell. First he courted and wed 19-year-old Martha Salsbury, in Elkhorn, Wis., and just a few months later he almost met his death in the icy waters of Lake Michigan. In December he and two fellow loggers were crossing Green Bay to an island to cut timber when caught in a sudden storm. The boat capsized, and Boswell’s fellows, encumbered in their heavy winter clothing, quickly drowned, but Boswell managed to right the boat and crawl aboard. Soaked to the skin, he almost froze to death before making it to shore and finding help. He survived the experience, but pneumonia left him with lung damage. Doctors advised a change of climate, and Boswell soon headed west, telling his bride he would send for her once settled.
In Colorado Territory he practiced his lumbering trade and worked the mines. With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 he signed up with a regiment of Colorado Volunteers. In June 1864 he was a member of the party that responded to the site of the notorious Hungate Massacre, in which Arapaho raiders brutally killed a settler, his wife and two infant daughters and left behind their horribly mutilated bodies. He helped remove the remains to Denver, where the bodies were put on public display. Within months the resulting outrage prompted the even more infamous Sand Creek Massacre, a retaliatory raid of Colorado Volunteers led by Colonel John M. Chivington. The volunteers slaughtered some 150 Cheyenne and Arapahos, mostly women and children, though they were not without casualties, recording 15 killed and about 50 wounded. Boswell was a member of the unit but took no part in its gruesome aftermath (including the mutilation of Indian bodies), as he was an early casualty in the assault.
In 1867 Boswell moved to Cheyenne, Dakota Territory (Wyoming Territory was born on July 25, 1868), one of the towns springing up along the tracks as the Union Pacific Railroad pushed its steel rails westward for its historical linkup with the Central Pacific at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory, in 1869. Unlike most of the other “Hell on Wheels” towns that dried up and blew away as the railroad advanced, Cheyenne showed every sign of developing into a big city in sparsely populated Wyoming Territory. There he might settle down, start a business of some sort and grow up with the country, as the saying went. Nathaniel sent for wife Martha.
Dealing with a druggist bitten by the gold bug, Boswell traded the claim he held in a Colorado Territory mine for a stock of drugs and opened the first drugstore in Cheyenne. Asked how he expected to be successful in the drug business when he knew nothing about pharmacy, he replied there were plenty of unemployed druggists he could hire to run the store. When two applied for the job, he showed he was serious by opening a second store in Laramie, another burgeoning town 50 miles west of Cheyenne.
Lawlessness ran rampant in these new communities, and Boswell soon joined the local Citizens’ Committee, one of many such vigilante groups formed to combat desperado gangs. His participation came to the attention of friend David J. Cook, the Denver city marshal, who had recently established a loosely organized group of Western crime fighters he called the Rocky Mountain Detective Agency, and he enlisted Boswell in that effort. In 1868, through the combined efforts of the Citizens’ Committee and members of the Cook agency, lawmen wiped out one of the worst criminals gangs, led by Lee H. Musgrove. They caught outlaw gang members Asa Moore, “Long Steve” Young, “Big Ned” Wilson and Con Wager and lynched them in Laramie. Cook himself cornered Ed Franklin in Golden City, Colorado Territory, and, when he resisted arrest, shot him dead. Boswell and other Wyoming Territory vigilantes captured Sanford Duggan and turned him over to Cook, who took him to Denver, where another vigilante group hanged him from a cottonwood tree. Boswell was a member of the posse that captured gang boss Musgrove, who was also lynched in Denver.
In 1869 Wyoming Territory officials organized the huge new county of Albany, which stretched north from the Colorado Territory border to the Montana Territory border, a distance of 400 miles. Due to the renown Boswell had gained as a fearless manhunter with the vigilantes, Territorial Governor John Allen Campbell on May 25, 1869, appointed him the new county’s first sheriff. The following year Boswell won election to the office. Wyoming had adopted woman’s suffrage in 1869, and Sheriff Boswell surprised many residents when at a highly publicized trial in Laramie in 1870 he summoned a woman to serve on the jury and logged another first—the appointment of a woman, one of “large proportions and commanding presence,” as a court bailiff.
Although in his long career in law enforcement Boswell never killed a man, he was deadly accurate with a six-shooter, as he demonstrated shortly after being elected. Carrying a warrant for a desperado named Kelly, wanted for a killing outside Fort Steele, Boswell caught up with the fugitive near Red Oak, Iowa. When Kelly took flight and ignored the lawman’s order to stop, Boswell, armed only with a pistol, dropped to one knee, took dead aim, and brought down the running man with a body shot that put him out of commission. Pacing off the distance of that extraordinary disabling shot, a deputy found it had covered 220 yards.
One day in 1871 a dangerous gunman named Jack Watkins went on a spree in Cheyenne, and no city officer seemed anxious to collar him. (See “Jack Watkins, the Laramie Terror,” by R.K. DeArment, in the April 2010 Wild West.) Boswell happened to be in town, and a federal judge approached him, pleading with the sheriff to arrest Watkins before he killed somebody. Boswell demurred, saying he had no authority to make an arrest, as he was out of his jurisdiction. The judge responded by pinning a deputy U.S. marshal’s badge on Boswell’s vest and swearing him in on the spot. Emboldened by the assistance of the renowned Albany County sheriff, local officers helped Boswell take Watkins into custody. From that day on Boswell maintained his authority as a deputy U.S. marshal. In July 1872 Sheriff Boswell quelled an incipient riot in the Albany County jail, again without the loss of life.
The following year a new territorial penitentiary opened for business just outside Laramie, and Nathaniel Boswell, in addition to his duties as county sheriff and deputy U.S. marshal, accepted the position as the prison’s first warden.
Boswell abhorred one of his responsibilities as sheriff, that of tax collecting, and so, with the excuse that his new job as warden prevented him from touring the vast reaches of the county for that purpose, he declined to run for re-election in 1872. His admirers in Laramie instead pushed him for the position as city marshal, and soon he pinned on yet another new badge.
For the next four years he kept a tight lid on the town. His most memorable arrest was the August 1876 apprehension in Laramie of Jack McCall, the assassin of Wild Bill Hickok in Deadwood, Dakota Territory. Boswell turned over McCall to authorities in that territory, who took McCall to Yankton, where he was tried, convicted of the cowardly murder and hanged.
In 1878 Albany County commissioners urged Boswell to run again for sheriff, promising they would make other arrangements for the odious tax-collection duties. Boswell ran and was handily reelected that November.
The gold boom in the Black Hills of Dakota Territory had triggered yet another round of outlawry in Wyoming Territory, as road agents arrived in droves to prey on the stagecoach traffic between the rails at Cheyenne and distant Deadwood, center of the new El Dorado. Folks in Wyoming Territory were particularly incensed in August 1878 when an outlaw gang led by “Big Nose George” Parrott murdered popular peace officers E.R. “Bob” Widdowfield and Henry H. “Tip” Vincent. In December, Boswell, through contacts he had maintained with operatives of the Rocky Mountain Detective Agency, learned that four hard-looking toughs, believed to be members of the Parrott gang, were assembled near Rock Creek, about 50 miles west of Laramie. Although he would not officially assume the sheriff’s office until January 1879 when sworn in, Boswell did not wait for that formality. He gathered together a posse of 14 experienced fighting men and arranged for a special Union Pacific car to take him and his men to Rock Creek. There he dumped a suspected gang supporter out of bed and, under threat of lynching, got him to reveal the gang’s location. He and his posse surrounded the camp of outlaws, woke them from their slumbers and arrested Joe Minuse, Charles “Kid” Condon, “Hank” Harrington and Fred Robie, all known associates of Big Nose George, without firing a shot. Property belonging to officers Widdowfield and Vincent and an overcoat taken from shotgun messenger Boone May at a stagecoach holdup provided strong circumstantial evidence of the suspects’ guilt.
Boswell took his prisoners to Laramie, locked them up in the county jail and in the following days, acting on numerous tips, nabbed four other suspected gang members. The editor of the Laramie Daily Sentinel praised his work in rounding up this “harvest of road agents,” saying that with the help of “a most able and efficient corps of deputies and detectives [he had] done much to rid this country of those outlaws.” In a later issue he enthused, “Verily, ‘Boz’ and his deputies are ‘gathering them in.’”
But the leaders of the gang, Big Nose George and a man of many aliases best known only as “Dutch Charlie,” remained on the loose, and Boswell was determined to hunt them down. Studying his prisoner haul, he decided Joe Minuse was the most likely to break under pressure and provide a lead to their whereabouts. Employing a method that would trigger apoplexy in present-day ACLU lawyers but that frontier lawmen found quite efficient, Boswell alternately hoisted Minuse by the neck and lowered him until he spewed details about the gang leaders. Parrott had fled to the vicinity of Miles City, Montana Territory, he said, and he believed Dutch Charlie was in Green River City, Wyoming Territory. Boswell wired this information to officers in those areas, and they soon captured the two fugitives.
Most of the men Boswell rounded up were tried, convicted and sentenced to penitentiary terms, but the gang leaders met hempen justice. On January 4, 1879, as lawmen were transferring Dutch Charlie from Laramie to Rawlins for trial, a mob of masked men removed him from the train at Carbon and hanged him from a telegraph pole. Parrott stood trial for murder, was convicted and sentenced to death, but on March 22, 1881, an armed mob broke into the Rawlins jail, dragged him out and strung him up, also from a telegraph pole.
Following his coup rounding up the road agent gang, Boswell was elected to his fourth term as Albany County sheriff in 1880, but by 1882 he decided he had held that office long enough, chose not to run again and moved to a ranch he had purchased some 35 miles south of Laramie on the Colorado border. But he was not destined to remain out of the manhunting business very long. In July 1883 the Wyoming Stock Growers Association set up a detective bureau and selected Boswell to head it up at the attractive salary of $200 a month.
Drawing on his vast experience as a city, county and federal lawman and especially his work with the Rocky Mountain Detective Association, Boswell did well in his new position. As chief of a group of detectives and inspectors charged with protecting the cattle herds of large-scale ranchers from the depredations of rustlers, Boswell’s work was largely secretive. “Much of their work is of such a nature as cannot be properly discussed in detail,” the association reported at its 1884 annual meeting. “It is sufficient to say that their efforts have been widely directed and had been remarkably successful. Large numbers of leaders in the more prominent cases of theft…are now in arrest and under indictment, some having been overtaken in Texas and Arkansas.”
Thomas Sturgis, the secretary, was still sanguine in his spring 1885 report: “The operations…have been nobly conducted by Judge [Charles W.] Wright [the association’s legal counsel] and Mr. N. K. Boswell, and…not since Wyoming became a stock country has there been as little violation of the stock laws as there is today.”
In October 1887 Boswell resigned, claiming ill health, and Frank Canton, a former Wyoming sheriff and a controversial frontier figure, replaced him. “Mr. Boswell has been very sick, and fears are entertained for his life at times,” reported the association secretary. “He has had another attack of neuralgia of the heart…and his nervous system seems to be pretty well undermined.”
By then in his 50s, he retired to the ranch with wife Martha and their only child, 11-year-old Minnie. Martha died in 1893, pushing Nathaniel further into seclusion, with one notable exception: When President Theodore Roosevelt came to Wyoming in 1903, Boswell was one of 10 honorary marshals who escorted him by horseback the 65 miles from Laramie to Cheyenne.
Boswell died on October 12, 1921, three weeks shy of his 85th birthday. “He was the most feared man who desperadoes had to contend with,” wrote the Laramie Boomerang about those turbulent early years when Boswell wore multiple badges. “He was a man of men, whose pages of life are free from the stain of cowardice or fear.” Whenever and wherever trouble loomed, the cry went up, “Send for Boswell!”
Award-winning R.K. DeArment writes often for Wild West. For further reading see his Assault on the Deadwood Stage: Road Agents and Shotgun Messengers; Wyoming’s Territorial Sheriffs, by Ann Gorzalka; and Boswell: The Story of a Frontier Lawman, by Mary Lou Pence.
Originally published in the October 2014 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here.
