A Western writer wages a one-man battle to choose the best frontier quote. Among the quotable contenders are Virgil Earp, Doc Holliday, John Wesley Hardin, Buffalo Bill Cody and Sitting Bull.
Every good writer knows that a story doesn’t breathe until the characters speak. Quotes bring the reader behind the facts of the narrative to its beating heart. It’s the same with the history of the West. Learning the chronology of what Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer did at the Little Bighorn is great. But knowing what participants said as a battle brewed makes it live across time.
After much fussing and pondering, I’ve compiled a list of what I believe are the top 10 best things anybody in the Wild West ever said. Preposterous, you think. No one can claim authority in listing remarks that stand out through history. I’d have to agree. My choices, admittedly, come with heavy doses of personal taste and preference.
Many of the quotes that follow have appeared previously in the pages of Wild West, whose editors—and I’m sure many faithful readers—appreciate a good true Western quote. If you have a favorite, send it to the magazine and go online [www .historynet.com] to see what caught others’ ears. Remember, we’re talking legitimate quotes from the real West. No frontier gibberish here. On June 25, 1876, Custer never shouted, “Ready or not, here I come!”—not that we know of, anyway.
So many choices, so little space. Let’s take a moment to discuss quotes that didn’t make the cut.
One night in the late 1870s, frontier entertainer Eddie Foy was making his usual cracks about his audience when gunman Ben Thompson took offense and drew his hogleg. Foy managed to escape his predicament by quipping, “A man accustomed to killing tigers would feel himself belittled if he were asked to go on a squirrel hunt.” Foy was not only a cool customer but also understood his place in the world, a self-awareness that likely kept him alive on other occasions.
Hangman George Maledon was similarly unflappable. He operated the gallows for “Hanging Judge” Isaac Parker, at Fort Smith, Ark., from the mid-1880s to the mid-1890s. For $5 a pop, Maledon broke some 60 necks in the name of the law. Asked if the ghosts of the men he sent through the trapdoor haunted him, Maledon said, “No, because I reckon I hanged them, too.” Everything about Maledon’s bloodless nature comes through in those chilling words.
So why didn’t Foy or Maledon make my top 10? Each delivered a great quote, but neither is a celebrated Old West character. Celebrity mattered in my compilation.
Preacher’s son John Wesley Hardin only killed 20 or 30 men—a relative slacker compared to Maledon. But the much-feared Texas gunman made my list, as he’s the reigning giant of certifiable Western shootists and, unlike Maledon, killed men on his own time and for his own, often warped, personal reasons.
Robert Clay Allison, another preacher’s boy, couldn’t stop the bongo drums in his head either and nearly made the list on the strength of an episode at a New Mexico Territory restaurant in 1874. Crazy Clay was enjoying a meal with his rival, Chunk Colbert, when he shot Colbert dead. Asked why he ate first and jerked his gun later, Allison said, “Because I didn’t want to send a man to hell on an empty stomach.” The occasion wasn’t dramatic enough to include Allison on my list. But when circumstance and celebrity combined, the dialogue sizzled.
On October 26, 1881, a mad-as-hell Wyatt Earp met Ike Clanton in court in Tombstone. Wyatt hollered to his nemesis: “You damned dirty cow thief, you’ve been threatening our lives, and I know it! I think I would be justified in shooting you down anyplace I should meet you! But if you’re anxious to make a fight, I will go anywhere on earth to make a fight with you—even over to San Simon, among your own crowd!” Blustering Ike responded: “Fight is my racket, and all I want is 4 feet of ground!”
Great stuff. But let’s be honest—what’s the likelihood that closemouthed Wyatt, who rarely put two words together in the same month, could make anybody’s list of memorable quotes? He preferred to speak with his ice-blue eyes.
The same is true of all the Earp boys, right? So how did Virgil Earp make the list? As for Wyatt Earp’s pal Doc Holliday, how could I exclude him? The tubercular doctor’s wit at times approached that of Mark Twain. Shortly before his death in Colorado, a reporter asked Holliday if he was ever troubled by his conscience. The whiskey-breathed skeletal Southerner replied, “No, I coughed that up with my lungs years ago.”
As a writer, I sit at my computer all day trying to produce lines that good. Holliday was the master, even under the gun. But that memorable Holliday line didn’t make the list. (The one that did is better still.)
Because of his status as a Western legend, I wanted to include Kit Carson. But he exhibited a recurring trait among frontiersmen—Carson was a man of action, not words. Still, I love what Carson said about quitting school to work and hunt game in support of his family after his father died in 1818: “I jumped to my rifle and threw down my spelling book—and there it lies.”
Those simple words, as much as any I’ve read, explain how tough, essential and often illiterate men like Carson came to open the frontier. That said, Carson didn’t make the list. But other famous Westerners— also not celebrated for their wit —did make it, including Wild Bill Hickok, William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody and Sitting Bull.
Sitting Bull? We don’t think of the great Hunkpapa Sioux chief as a wordsmith, but he occasionally laid it on the line in ways many find stirring. In 1881, five years after Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull returned from Canada and surrendered to U.S. authorities. After turning over his gun to his son for surrender, the chief said: “I wish it to be remembered that I was the last man of my tribe to surrender my rifle. This boy has given it to you, and he now wants to know how he is going to make a living.” One has to admire the defiance in those words, the grit and pride. The Sitting Bull quote that did make the list shows that spirit and more.
Fame wasn’t always the deciding factor. Lesser figures elbowed their way into contention, especially if they were involved in a particularly significant event—the Little Bighorn, for instance. Just before he rode into the valley with Custer, Sioux scout Bloody Knife bade goodbye to the sun in sign language and said, “I shall not see you go down behind the hills tonight.” Offering stiff competition is a quote from fellow scout Half Yellow Face, who told Custer just before the battle, “You and I are both going home today by a road that we do not know.” What great lines—both screenplay makers.
And don’t forget Major Marcus Reno, who led a charge on the south end of the Indian encampment, met stiff resistance and fled to the bluffs above what is now Reno Creek. In the midst of the melee, Bloody Knife, who was standing beside the major, took a bullet through the head. The company surgeon later remarked to Reno that the troops were demoralized by their disorderly retreat. Wearing Bloody Knife’s brains on his face and clothing, Reno responded irritably, “That was a cavalry charge, sir!”
Any writer wanting to craft a character out of his mind with panic could find no better words. But alas, Reno didn’t make the list. Nor did Bloody Knife, Half Yellow Face or Colonel Custer himself, never mind that George was the yellow-haired Britney Spears of Old West celebrities.
Despite his vantage from the Crow’s Nest and advance warning of the massive village below, Custer refused to lay back. Indeed, his great ego, outsized bravery and love of glory made him salivate at the prospect, among the reasons he stands so tall in the American imagination. “The largest Indian camp on the North American continent is ahead,” he said, “and I am going to attack it!” Certainly a character-defining remark, but my vote went to Custer subordinate Captain Frederick Benteen, whose quote, as you’ll read, captures everything about the Little Bighorn fiasco.
My research led to an entirely new category I’m calling the Death Quote. When facing possible demise, people often demonstrate a knack for saying unforgettable things. As 20-year-old outlaw Crawford Goldsby, alias Cherokee Bill, stood on the gallows in 1896, he was asked if he had anything to say. “No,” he replied, “I came here to die, not make a speech.” Simple, purposeful and unambiguous— all emblematic of the frontier way.
Another contender was George Shears. Never heard of him? He rode with Henry Plummer, the infamous two-faced Montana Territory sheriff, and died at the end of a rope amid the boomtown trouble of 1864. Vigilantes forced Shears to climb a ladder while they looped one end of a rope around his neck, the other around the ladder’s top rung. As hangmen steadied the ladder, Shears looked down and said: “Gentlemen, I’m not used to this. Shall I jump off or slide off?” They suggested he jump, so he did, with a predictable result.
Fine as that line is, it couldn’t compete with two other death quotes, each uttered by a cavalry officer on the Great Plains. The first, Major Joel Elliott, rode with Custer’s 7th Cavalry in November 1868. As the Battle of the Washita raged, Elliott spotted fleeing Indians and pursued them. But the escaping Cheyennes ambushed Elliott’s command, killing him and 18 men. Before riding to his death, the brave major delivered a stirring line any scribbler would’ve been proud to pen: “Here goes, for a brevet or a coffin!” The other officer’s quote edged out Elliott, making the list.
Finally, consider the last memorable utterance of one Andrew Myrick, a trader at Minnesota’s Redwood Agency in the early 1860s. Hearing that Indians were starving, he sniped, “If they’re hungry, let them eat grass for all I care,” a line that harks back to Marie Antoinette’s dismissal of hungry peasants during the French Revolution. Some time after Myrick’s remark, rampaging Sioux led a mini-revolution of their own, murdering 24 people at the agency, including Myrick. Recalling his taunt, the warriors stuffed his mouth with grass, a demonstration of the power of words.
Yes, I could go on. But I came here to provide the best quotes, not make a speech. Therefore, following are my top 10 Western quotes—and you can quote me on that.
10 Hanging Judge Isaac Parker was known for lengthy and sometimes cruel verbal abuse of the men he sentenced to hang. But at his 1895 trial, outlaw Henry Starr wasn’t about to let the blowhard jurist hog the stage, interrupting Parker with an unforgettable speech of his own: “Don’t try to stare me down, old Nero! I’ve looked many a better man than you in the eye. Cut out the rot and save your wind for your next victim. If I am a monster, you are a fiend, for I have put only one man to death, while almost as many men have been slaughtered by your jawbone as Samson slew with the jawbone of that other historic ass.”
9 In 1877, with his life and those of his people in tatters, Nez Perce leader Chief Joseph gave future historians the chills with his simple, lyrical and heartbreaking surrender speech: “It is cold, and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death….Hear me, my chiefs. I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.”
8 In 1871 John Wesley Hardin was in an Abilene hotel room, trying to get some shuteye, when a man in the next room started snoring like a bear. So, Hardin drew his gun and fired through the wall. The shot jolted the man awake, and he sat up in bed, whereupon Hardin fired again, killing him. Later, while seeking to defend his reputation, the Texas gunman instead defined his violent nature in the most vivid and unintentionally hilarious way imaginable: “They tell lots of lies about me. They say I killed six or seven men for snoring. Well, it ain’t true—I only killed one man for snoring.”
7 After gunmen shot Virgil Earp from ambush in Tombstone in late December 1881, friends carried him to the Cosmopolitan Hotel, where an extraordinary scene unfolded. With blood everywhere, fear everywhere, guns everywhere, Allie Earp leaned over her husband’s bed, anguish etched on her face. Who would’ve guessed that a hardened lawman named Earp, from a family of men not known for their verbal skills, could at that moment render one of the West’s great romantic lines: “Never mind, I’ve got one arm left to hug you with.”
6 In August 1874, Sixth Cavalry Captain Adna R. Chaffee, a Civil War veteran from Ohio, charged a band of Kiowa Indians near Mulberry Creek (in Texas) during the Red River War. As the excited captain launched the attack, he urged on his troopers with a battle cry so ridiculous that history cannot forget it. Though the soldiers only suffered two men wounded, and Chaffee lived to fight in other battles and other wars (Spanish-American War and Boxer Rebellion), it stands as the Wild West’s most memorable death quote: “Forward! If any man is killed, I will make him a corporal!”
5 In his youth, William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody scouted for Lt. Gen. Phil Sheridan in Kansas. In the summer of 1869, while he was guiding Lieutenant Edward Ward and a small command, Cody crawled to a hilltop and spotted a huge Lakota village. Leaning over to Ward, Cody delivered a line that showed him to be the anti-Custer—in other words, he demonstrated discretion and judgment, as well as a wonderful sense of comedic timing, which likely served him well as the foremost Wild West showman and an international celebrity: “This is no place for us, Lieutenant. I think we have important business at the camp to attend to as soon as possible.”
4 At an 1883 dedication ceremony for the Northern Pacific, Sitting Bull stood before the ultimate symbol of conquest, the railroad—loud, smoking and unstoppable—and its clueless executives, who probably thought the Lakota leader should be grateful for what they’d brought his people. Rather than deliver some cold gruel to appease those men, the chief laid it on the line, serving as a paradigm of politically incorrect oratory. In his own language, he growled: “I hate all the white people. You are thieves and liars. You have taken away our land and made us outcasts.”
3 On July 12, 1861, at Rock Creek Station, Neb., Dave McCanles, outraged that his mistress was canoodling with Wild Bill Hickok, pulled his six-shooter and challenged Bill to come outside and “fight fair.” When Bill refused, McCanles, who had about two minutes to live, hollered he was coming inside to force Hickok out. The longhaired gunman responded with a remark that captured the deadly cool, grace under pressure and wit that made him a frontier Dirty Harry: “There’ll be one less SOB if you try that!”
2 When the shooting stopped at the Little Bighorn, some of Reno’s men went to confirm for themselves the awful news Brig. Gen. Alfred Terry’s command had shared—that Custer and all his men were dead. One of those who rode out was Custer’s nemesis, Captain Frederick Benteen. Many believe Benteen played a role in the disaster by failing to answer Custer’s command to come quickly and bring ammunition packs—a lapse, the argument goes, that stems from the open hatred between the two men. As he stood over the naked corpse of his fallen commander, Benteen blurted a remark that perfectly captured the anger, shock, regret, guilt and, yes, admiration he must have felt on that blood-soaked hillside: “There he is, God damn him. He will never fight anymore.”
1 On the morning of the O.K. Corral gunfight, Ike Clanton went to the rooming house of Doc Holliday, rifle in hand, seeking to shoot Holliday dead. Told Clanton was hunting him, the dentist-turned-gambler gave a reply that laid bare everything in his character—his fatalism and faith, his illness, his sense of humor, his guts and his gambler’s heart. Under the circumstances, just hours before the West’s seminal gunfight, it ranks as the greatest line ever: “If God will let me live to get my clothes on, he shall see me.”
Leo W. Banks has made his living as a writer in Tucson for 30 years. He has written 320 stories for Arizona Highways and five histories for its books division, as well as four articles—and counting—for Wild West.
Originally published in the October 2009 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here.
