Few frontiersmen could hope to die as dramatically as Crockett at the Alamo or Custer at the Little Bighorn, but some fellers managed to go out in a blaze of uniqueness.
Death plays a prominent role in our collective recollection of the Wild West, and how could it be otherwise? Westerners have long defined themselves by action, so it makes sense we’d fixate on the roar of the pistol, the thrust of the bayonet or the chilling slam-bang of a dropping gallows trapdoor. And many men of action wanted, as Hollywood often says, to die with their boots on.
Writer Ernest Hemingway coined the term “moment of truth” to describe the deadly climax of a bullfight, and such moments occurred on the frontier, too. They shape, color and define Western characters, fixing them in our memories. Almost as a prerequisite for U.S. citizenship, we can recall the romantic image of Davy Crockett at the Alamo, swinging his rifle, Old Betsy, as Mexican soldiers rush him, bayonets fixed. And buckskin-clad, longhaired George Custer, slashing with his sword on Last Stand Hill, as depicted by painters Cassilly Adams and Otto Becker, has become an icon of frontier art. The questions dogged historians have raised about such images can’t penetrate the armor of sentiment that cloaks them. They will always remain the West’s best deaths.
Beyond these two celebrated demises, fame plays a secondary role in making my own list of memorable deaths in the Old West. (No voting was carried out, nor any consulting with the editorial staff of Wild West, but feel free to share your opinion: WildWest@weiderhistorygroup.com.) Many of the West’s celebrated figures passed from this realm in common or predictable ways, without the redemptive quality of exceptional drama. Geronimo got drunk and fell from his horse into a creek near Fort Sill, Okla., in February 1909, dying a short time later of pneumonia. Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse died violently while being taken into custody, but neither episode involved much glory or heroism. The same could be said for Billy the Kid, Jesse James and Wild Bill Hickok, all felled by a single round fired at close range. The Kid’s death, in a darkened room before the gun of Pat Garrett, was straightforward police work, while the James and Hickok killings were simple assassinations—evil, cold and, as with the Kid’s death, somewhat anticlimactic, given the lives they had lived. The same holds for Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, both of whom died in bed, boots off. Bat Masterson spent his last years as a New York sportswriter and died in 1921 at his desk at The Morning Telegraph.
No, fame makes a lousy marker. My list of memorable deaths centers on little-known characters whose endings were too creative, too strange or too funny to forget.
In the creative category, consider Isom Prentice Olive, a Confederate soldier and Shiloh veteran from Texas. Following the Civil War, Olive became a well-to-do rancher who viewed cattle rustlers as little more than a pestilence to be exterminated. Near Tyler, Texas, in March 1876, Olive and his brothers shot rustlers James Crow and Turk Turner, wrapped them inside Olive-branded hides of butchered steers and left them in the blazing sun, still alive by some accounts. The heat shrank the skins, slowly and excruciatingly suffocating the men inside —an old method of Spanish torture known as the “death of the skins.”
Legend has it Jules Beni died in excruciating fashion, too, perhaps at the hands of express agent Jack Slade—though others insist the hard case was already dead, compliments of Slade’s men, before Slade got to him. The straight version of the encounter appears in Dan Rottenberg’s 2008 book Death of a Gunfighter: The Quest for Jack Slade, the West’s Most Elusive Legend and his related article in the April 2010 Wild West. In this account, Slade’s men Nelson Vaughan and John Frey overtook the wanted Beni, exchanged fire with him, roped him to a packhorse and made for a nearby ranch. Beni died en route, but not wanting to miss out on the reward, the men tied the corpse to a snubbing post and concocted a story. When Slade arrived, they told him Beni was waiting in ambush in the corral. Spotting Beni lashed to the post, Slade told the would-be bounty hunters, “This man is dead.” To settle the matter, Slade took his knife and sliced off first one and then the other of Beni’s ears, keeping them as souvenirs.
Barbaric as that was, popular legend claims Jack was the one who tied Beni to the post, then used him for pistol practice. As the story continues, Slade wandered off for a shot of whiskey, then returned and resumed fire. Only when Beni was good and dead did Slade cut off his ears and drop them in his vest pocket.
Though Slade did plenty of good for the Central Overland Stage, his reputation as a ruthless killer has lived on, thanks in part to Mark Twain, who once met the express agent and described him as “a man whose heart and hands and soul were steeped in the blood of offenders against his dignity.”
Poor Frank Cody of Deer Creek, New Mexico Territory, would probably have chosen Beni’s fate over what happened to him. On May 18, 1889, The National Police Gazette reported that Indians had dragged the ranchman from his home and shot him. They then brought Cody back inside, placed him “upon a red-hot stove and held [him] there until he was cooked to death.” Calling it “a fiendish story of Indian brutality,” the Gazette drove home the point with a drawing of feathered, hatchet-bearing renegades dancing around the Cody family cookstove.
Bringing stories alive with vivid artwork was something new in the journalism of the time. The Gazette was a pioneer in the practice. As with similar publications, such as The Illustrated Police News, the emphasis was on exploring the dark and oddball corners of human nature.
In 1884 the Police News published a story about an angry Nebraska mob that pulled an unnamed murderer from court and roped him to a windmill. Whether they intended to use him as target practice, à la Jules Beni, or simply spin him to death is unknown. The sheriff intervened, freeing the man before they could decide.
But one New Mexico Territory windmill did accommodate three hasty revenge killings. On February 8, 1880, a lynch mob in Las Vegas pulled cowboys T.J. House, James West and John Dorsey from jail and hanged them from the giant, creaking structure in the town plaza. The trio of Texas toughs had drunkenly killed Marshal Joe Carson in a variety hall shootout. Their executions were grim and unforgettable.
West, who’d been shot through the lung in the shootout, had to be carried to the windmill. Before being “jerked up,” as The Daily Optic put it, by 50 masked vigilantes, West said, “Please button up my pants.” Last words rarely come so small and unseemly. But matters quickly worsened. “The hanging was apparently a failure,” reported the Optic, “and the mob, fearing someone would come to protect the prisoners, commenced shooting.” It became a bloodbath. House fell at the first shot and crawled to the side of the platform shouting, “Boys, for God’s sake, shoot me again! Shoot me in the head!” Dorsey met the same justice, “pierced through with bullets.” Citizens awoke the next morning to find three men dead on the windmill platform.
In one of those wonderful flourishes of language so common in frontier newspapers, the Santa Fe New Mexican reported, “Las Vegas has had another cannibalistic feast—cold man for breakfast was served up there last Sunday morning in three courses.” The episode rattled the citizens of Las Vegas. Oddly, though, they aimed their reproach not at the masked vigilantes but at the windmill itself. Under the headline, LYNCH THE WINDMILL, the Optic said the structure was “too great a temptation” and reported that many local children, influenced by the awful events they’d witnessed, had tried to hang dogs from the windmill. A petition was circulated to tear it down.
For creative deaths, few can top that of Tulsa Jack Blake, a bank and train robber who rode with the Doolin Gang. When lawmen closed in on the boys’ camp on the Cimarron River in the spring of 1895, a gunfight erupted that scattered all of Doolin’s men, except Blake. Suddenly, a lawman’s bullet struck the stubborn outlaw’s cartridge belt, causing a shell to explode—killing Blake with one of his own bullets.
It’s hard to discuss death in the Wild West without mentioning George Maledon. The antithesis of creative, he was a businessman whose special skill was breaking necks in the name of the law. For more than a decade, Maledon—described in various accounts as “long-whiskered” and “quiet,” a “kindly family man” with “hollow, expressionless eyes”—served as executioner for the federal court in the Western District of Arkansas, with plenty of work thrown his way by “Hanging Judge” Isaac Parker. He used “ropes made of chosen hemp fiber, woven by hand in St. Louis and treated with a peachy oil substance to prevent their slipping,” writes Glenn Shirley in Law West of Fort Smith: A History of Frontier Justice in Indian Territory, 1834–1896.
Although various authors have credited Maledon with 60 or more executions, park rangers at Arkansas’ Fort Smith National Historic Site say the real figure is closer to 30. The exaggerations stemmed partly from high-tone Eastern reporters who considered Maledon great copy, a symbol of the wild frontier, and partly from Maledon himself. After his retirement in 1894, he toured the country with his rope, sections of his gallows and photos of the condemned men, trading on the ghoulish nature of his former occupation.
Maledon drew big crowds to what resembled tent revivals —though certainly none of his clients would ever revive—in which the infamous “Prince of Hangmen” took great pride. Asked if he feared the ghosts of those he’d executed, Maledon replied, “No, I have never hanged a man who came back to have the job done over.” It takes a certain eye to see compassion in snapping a man’s neck. But as Maledon often pointed out, a hanging done incorrectly could lead to slow strangulation, a far more gruesome end.
Outlaw James Singleton died exactly that way in Texas in 1877, although he is remembered more for the will he composed immediately before his execution. It sounds like legend, but Bee County, Texas, makes proud claim to the story as fact.
Singleton asked that his skin be used to make two drumheads, one inscribed with the Lord’s Prayer, the other with the following words: “We, the jury, find the defendant, Jas. E. Singleton, guilty of murder in the first degree, as charged in the indictment, and assess the penalty of death.” Singleton also requested that his friend Frank Boggus beat the drums every year on June 8. And it gets even better. The bizarre will continued: “The viscera, and other parts of my body useless for anatomical purposes, I wish composted for a fertilizer and presented to Mr. Barclay, proprietor of the Grand Palace Hotel, in Beeville, to be used by him for the purpose of nourishing the growth of cabbage, turnips, pertaters [sic] and other garden sass that the worthy people of Bee County—or at least the masculine portion thereof—may have something to relieve the monotony of hash and dried apples during their brief sojourn at the aforesaid hotel.” When facing the gallows, the thoughts of most men turn to God or their mothers. Singleton’s mind turned to compost.
Of course, slow strangulation might’ve been preferable to what befell John Thornton, the oldest man ever executed at Fort Smith. The day of his death, June 28, 1892, began wonderfully, according to the Fort Smith Elevator: “With a smile upon his face and a bouquet of flowers in his hand, John Thornton, the slayer of his only daughter, marched forth Tuesday morning to perform the last act in the drama of a life so illy lived. Nature in all its loveliness and beauty smiled upon him, and the bright glorious sunlight of the June morning played upon the silvery hair of an old man soon to be ushered into the presence of Him who said, ‘Thou shalt not kill!’” But the proceedings soon lurched downhill.
Thornton, who’d grown obese in jail, fell too far through the gallows trap, resulting in near decapitation. Only a few stubborn tendons kept his head from coming off and rolling around like a bowling ball. According to the Elevator, “A thrill of horror ran through those within the enclosure, and strong men turned sick” at the sight of the body rebounding in the air. The bloody result saturated Thornton’s new suit, and his coffin dripped blood as it was lowered into the ground.
Errant heads are a staple of frontier death stories. Decapitation was done out of revenge and cruelty, to be sure. But in a sense, it was also a way of exhaling—expressing relief the ogre was gone, its head serving as proof. Probably the three most talked-about heads in the West belonged to Mexican bandido Joaquín Murrieta, Confederate guerrilla William T. “Bloody Bill” Anderson and Rebel partisan William Clarke Quantrill, who rode with Anderson.
After Murrieta’s death in 1853 at the hands of California Rangers, his head was parted from his torso and ultimately displayed to the public in Stockton and elsewhere (see story in the April 2009 Wild West). Various histories say it vanished in the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
Bloody Bill reportedly lost his dome outside Albany, Mo., in 1864. The Yankee militiamen who took it might’ve been motivated by Anderson’s grisly practice of wearing a necklace of Northern scalps. Adding insult to injury, Anderson’s killers fixed his head atop a telegraph pole, no doubt prompting fascinating sidewalk conversation.
No frontier corpse enjoyed a busier afterlife than Quantrill’s. He was killed in Kentucky in 1865 but, according to author Edward E. Leslie, wasn’t wholly buried until his skull was deposited in a grave in Dover, Ohio, in October 1992, ending “a century of shenanigans.” In his 1996 biography The Devil Knows How to Ride, Leslie wrote that in the decades following Quantrill’s death, his bones had been stolen, bartered, sold, displayed, laughed over at fraternity parties and split between graves in three different states.
One of the interesting characters in that saga was William Walter Scott, a boyhood friend of the raider who worked with Quantrill’s mother to learn his fate. The two exhumed her son’s remains for reburial. But in 1888 Scott, a perpetually broke newspaper publisher, offered to sell Quantrill’s skull to the Kansas State Historical Society. His letter proposing the deal stands as one of the West’s great testimonials to ghoulish greed: “What would his skull be worth to your society?” Scott asked. Some part of him must’ve been revolted by his actions, as he goes on to plead for confidentiality. “Destroy this letter when read, and I will do the same with yours. No one in the world knows I can get the head, but I can.”
In 1902 Scott died, and his widow sold his files on Quantrill and three of the raider’s arm bones to that historical society. One of its officers, William E. Connelley, continued the craziness by trying to swap the bones, first for Jesse James’ gun and then for Wild Bill Hickok’s revolver, holster and gun belt. Neither deal went through, and Connelley, in Leslie’s words, “gave up in disgust and donated the bones to [the society].”
The public display of bodies and body parts wasn’t unusual on the frontier, as surviving photographs attest. In Tucson in August 1878, the corpse of stagecoach robber Billy Brazelton was tied upright to a chair outside the Pima County courthouse, clad in his highwayman’s outfit, including hood and slouch hat, cartridge belt, Spencer rifle and button jacket, which helped conceal the 10 bullet holes administered by lawmen. Brazelton had pulled nine holdups wearing a hideous white muslin hood with poke holes for eyes and a strip of red flannel stitched over the mouth. The papers called him the “Bloody Mouth Bandit.” Lawmen displayed Brazelton’s body, and photographers snapped images of him with and without the hood, but in either case quite dead.
Whether the display of a corpse had any civilizing effect is unknowable. But one corpse has doubtless had a lasting impact: the body of Minneconjou Indian leader Big Foot, photographed dead in the snows of Wounded Knee, South Dakota. The gruesome image, his arms frozen and raised, as if beseeching, has become a staple of most accounts of that 1890 catastrophe. More than that, it stands as a reminder of the sometimes-painful costs of Western settlement.
Death also served to measure the temperature of the times, the passions with which men fought each other. The vigilante violence in Montana Territory in 1864 played out with exceptional brutality, as the fate of Joe Pizanthia showed. Suspected of several crimes, the bandit sought refuge in a cabin near Bannack, and when a pair of vigilantes came calling, Pizanthia killed one and shot the other in the hip. Others in the avenging group, now enraged, brought up a small howitzer from town and blasted the cabin to near rubble. Remarkably, Pizanthia survived the shelling. The man he’d wounded found this intolerable and emptied his pistol into Joe, whose corpse the vigilantes then hanged from a clothesline and perforated with more than 100 shots. Still not satisfied, the vigilantes set fire to the demolished cabin and tossed Pizanthia’s remains into the blaze. In the Western pulps, he became known as the man who had to be killed three times. Though it seems obvious Pizanthia didn’t survive, I feel obligated to state that fact plainly, as others endured brutal ordeals and lived, at least for a time.
The unfortunately named Harvey Twaddle settled in Arizona Territory in the late 1860s, when the reward for such foolhardiness was often an arrow to the chest. Twaddle, a gold miner, got just that when Yavapai Indians ambushed him as he tracked stray mules along the Hassayampa River south of Prescott. He yanked out the arrow and promptly fired six shots from his Henry rifle at the attacking Indians, killing one and wounding two more. Nine days later, when Twaddle finally died, a doctor opened his chest and made a stunning discovery —the arrow had penetrated his heart.
Is this possible? How can a man live with a perforated heart? Cardiologists say it could have happened exactly as reported if the headless reed arrow that struck Twaddle penetrated the right ventricle of his heart, the less important of the two chambers. When he pulled out the shaft, the heart muscles likely closed around the hole, stopping the bleeding. A shaft tipped with a bulky stone arrowhead might’ve been instantly lethal. And it wasn’t the hole in Twaddle’s heart that killed him. The cause of death was likely septic shock after bacteria from the dirty arrow entered his system. Author Patrick Hamilton, writing in 1883, described the Twaddle episode as “one of the most extraordinary instances of vitality on record.”
Seventh U.S. Cavalry Captain Albert Barnitz can provide Twaddle competition in the toughest character category. Riding in Indian Territory (today’s Oklahoma) with Custer in his attack on Black Kettle’s village on the Washita River in November 1868, Barnitz took a Cheyenne musket ball in the stomach at such close range it charred his overcoat. “[Barnitz] finally paused on a hilltop, dismounted and crawled into a depression, with the clear expectation that he was dying,” wrote Jerome A. Greene, author of Washita: The U.S. Army and the Southern Cheyennes, 1867–1869.
Some of Barnitz’s men laid him out on a buffalo robe atop the snow. The ball had entered his left side about 4 inches above the navel, exiting by his spine at waist level. The two doctors who attended the captain thought he’d die, too, prompting Barnitz to dictate a farewell note to his wife, Jennie. A close friend of Barnitz’s reported to Jennie, “The wound is one that rarely occurs without cutting the intestines, and that was what was at first appeared to be the case.”
But the shooting wasn’t fatal—at least for another 44 years. When Barnitz died in 1912, at age 77, pathologists said a growth around the old wound had contributed to his death. They also discovered a fragment of his Army overcoat inside his body, driven there by the ball. So a Cheyenne at the Washita killed Captain Barnitz after all.
As the Quantrill farce and Barnitz autopsy demonstrate, postmortem revelations play a role in any list of memorable deaths. In this category the big Western celebrities do much better. Billy the Kid’s postmortem has witnessed myriad burial and identity claims that keep his story alive. Bob Ford, “the dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard,” did the same for Jesse James. After shooting Jesse in the back of the head at his home in St. Joseph, Mo., on April 3, 1882, Ford went on tour, posing for photographs and re-enacting the murder onstage, crowds usually responding with wild boos. A marked man, Ford was eventually gunned down in a Colorado saloon in 1892. His brother Charlie, an accomplice in the James’ killing, was reportedly wracked by guilt, fell ill and committed suicide in 1884.
Frank James, Jesse’s older brother, also has a good postmortem story. Frank died in 1915 at his Missouri farm, his ashes kept in a bank vault until his wife’s death in 1944, when they were buried together. How ironic is that? A fellow who spent so much of his life trying to get inside banks in death finally does so, with all the time he needs.
Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday have weathered their postmortems well. Their gravesites have become tourist attractions and shrines for a steady flow of admirers, many of whom leave gifts. At Holliday’s memorial marker in the Pioneer Cemetery in Glenwood Springs, Colo., favored tokens include coins, jewelry, playing cards and poker chips. But Cindy Hines, director of that town’s Frontier Historical Museum, says she has also found a beautiful leather-covered silver flask, brimming with whiskey, and even a pile of human ashes, tagged with that person’s name and place of cremation. Someone, it seems, wanted to spend eternity with a cranky, tubercular dentist who drank too much. Wyatt’s grave draws similar hero worship. Young men hoping to become lawmen make a pilgrimage to the Hills of Eternity Cemetery in Colma, Calif., seeking spiritual guidance from the master. Groundskeepers there recover so many bullets from Earp’s gravesite that they hunt for them in the grass before mowing, fearing lawnmowers might set one off.
But the most memorable postmortem of all belongs to Wild Bill Hickok, and it has nothing to do with the poker hand Hickok allegedly held—aces and eights, the “Dead Man’s Hand”—when drifter Jack McCall shot him in the head at Deadwood’s Saloon No. 10 in 1876. As Hickok expert Joseph Rosa has written, that story is certainly myth, the first known reference to aces and eights not surfacing until the 1920s.
No, Hickok’s postmortem is memorable thanks to one bizarre fact: The ball McCall fired passed clear through Bill’s head and struck the left wrist of fellow poker player Bill Massie, lodging there. Massie lived another 34 years with the killer’s bullet in his wrist. Massie had earned some fame as a colorful steamboat captain. But the recognition he’d gained plying the West’s great rivers couldn’t compare with the result of his decision to play poker in Deadwood that day. Later, wherever he might stop along the Western rivers, townspeople heralded Massie for his macabre wrist ornament. As the Bismarck Daily Tribune put it on July 15, 1885: “The ball that killed Wild Bill arrived in the city yesterday.”
Realizing fate had made its decision, Massie accepted the fawning attention that came with the bullet, greeting well-wishers by saying, “Shake the hand that holds the ball that killed Wild Bill!” Hickok generated publicity with everything he did, and that continued after his death, which became— again, with apologies to Hemingway—a moveable feast.
Arizona author Leo W. Banks wrote “Wyatt Earp’s Most Controversial Decision” (August 2010 Wild West) and “Wild and Woolly War of Words” (October 2009 issue). For further reading: Encyclopedia of Western Gunfighters, by Bill O’Neal, and The Encyclopedia of Lawmen, Outlaws and Gunfighters, by Leon Metz.
Originally published in the October 2010 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here.
