Ep. 03: The First Gunfighters

Join author Bryan Burrough as he delves into the little-known stories of the first notable Old West gunfighters, from the Texans who popularized the first revolvers during the 1840s to the outlaws of Gold Rush California and the first gunfighter to achieve literary acclaim — thanks to a young Mark Twain. Thank you to our sponsor, Tecovas tecovas.com. Follow now on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-american-west/id1811365050, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0wrs79YL0Jw2AjQrCBKUUu?si=56a282df832a4bd2, iHeart, and YouTube https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQv7voZWHy4X3UFECqr3ggFIj9uQJT2O&si=TG3vGnVvFhznWz0g. MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAaa0mleeU128Ad5iM1RFIg, and Youtube Clips https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterClips Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-long-hunters.html?lang=en_US&persistUserId=MT777dfccfb5ad885f&_gl=1*1wsssmp*_gcl_au*OTE4NjU0MjA1LjE3NDE4MDEzNTI.*_ga*MTUzMTAxNzcxNC4xNzQwNTEzMzQ0*_ga_J3M86GMH9B*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuNTMuMC4w*_ga_VNCSXFY0BW*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuMC4wLjA." and "Mountain Men https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-mountain-men.html?lang=en_US" Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Shop MeatEater Merch https://store.themeateater.com/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  You guys are always hearing me talk about Montana Knife Company. I love these guys. Hands down, favorite knives. The blades are incredibly solid. These are high-quality tools that put in the work. Well, you asked for it, and I've been asking for it, and MKC finally did it. They're launching their very first folding knife. It's called the Montana. It'll be dropping soon. Go to MKC.com right now and sign up for email and text alerts, so you don't miss the drop. MKC.com. Montana Knife Company. Working knives for working people. Again, MKC.com.

• 0:40Speaker 02

  With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. Whether you're leading a big project, planning an elaborate trip, or trying to balance work and life, ChatGPT can help. Give it a goal, plus things like files, notes, or project plans. Develop a trip itinerary with daily updates, or create a prioritized schedule, so you can spend less energy sorting out the details and more on bringing your biggest ideas to life. Get started at ChatGPT.com.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  You ever get that feeling, the walls closing in, the concrete jungle suffocating you? You crave some wide-open spaces, the chance to connect with nature, maybe in a spot all your own? Well, head over to land.com. They've got ranches, forests, mountains, streams, you name it. Search by acreage. You can search by location. You can search by the kind of hunting and fishing you're dreaming of. Land.com. It is where the adventure begins.

• 1:35Speaker 03

  On June 9th, 1844, a squad of 15 Texas Rangers was patrolling the hill country northwest of San Antonio, looking for Comanche raiders. This was during the years when Texas was still an independent country, eight years after the Alamo, still a year before it would enter the Union. That day, the squad's leader, a sharp Ranger captain named Jack Hayes, had armed his men with a new weapon, something no one had used against the deadly Comanches and their allies. A private climbed a tree to study the horizon, and suddenly shouted, "Jerusalem, Captain! Yonder come a thousand Indians!" It was more like 100, but still, Hayes found himself outnumbered, something like 7 to 1.

• 2:19Speaker 03

  When the Comanches withdrew into a hilltop thicket and began heckling them, Hayes gathered his men. But rather than retreat or call for reinforcements, he announced they were going to charge. Fifteen Rangers, 100 Comanches, charged. And they did. As the horses barreled up toward the Comanche, the Rangers did as they always had, firing with their single-shot muskets. But once they re-sheathed their long guns, they didn't take out their swords, as they often did, but instead took out this new-fangled weapon, a massive, five-shot Colt revolver. As the Rangers plunged into the Comanches, a desperate hand-to-hand fight ensued, unlike anything in history to that point.

• 3:04Speaker 03

  Its impact would echo down through the years of the Gunfighter Era. This is Gunfighters, brought to you by Tacovus, good boots for good times.

• 3:22Speaker 03

  Hey, y'all, it's Brian, and thanks for dropping by. I'll tell you more about this fight in a minute, but first I want to say something about Jack Hayes and his men. They were Texans like me. I live in Austin these days. And as you'll hear, Texans played a big part in the story of the Gunfighter Era. It wasn't just that Texans were the first to popularize the new revolvers that helped make the Old West so wild, or their hallowed proficiency with these and other weapons. It was the visceral kind of personal violence they spawned, especially in the years after the Civil War, that did more to set the stage for the Gunfighter Era than just about anything else. Without Texas and these swaggering Texans, I'm not sure we're even here talking about gunfighters at all. Seriously.

• 4:07Speaker 03

  Which shouldn't be all that surprising. Texas was among the largest gateways for immigrants moving west, and for years was renowned as pretty much the most violent place in North America. Violence and gunplay were just in the Texans' DNA. I mean, it was a dangerous place, and had been from the beginning. Born of a bloody revolution against Mexico, the kind thing to say here is that Texans kind of needed to be violent. After the Mexican Revolution, they stayed at war pretty much for years against Mexican raiders, sure, but incessantly against the depredations of a Comanche nation that still occupied half of Texas on a diagonal line into the 1870s. Comanches raided as far as the Gulf Coast in those years.

• 4:51Speaker 03

  So yeah, Texans knew their guns, because they had to. But it wasn't until I started combing through the details of individual gunfights across the old frontier that I began to appreciate the extent of their influence. Because no matter where you look, not just in Texas, but in Arizona, in Montana, in Kansas, I mean, everywhere, you find a particular kind of person keeps turning up in major notable gunfights. A Texan. I noticed it right away. The great Texas historian Bill O'Neill has too. He's actually done a statistical analysis. Bill identified 589 major gunfights on the old frontier after the Civil War. 160 of them, nearly 30% happened in Texas,

• 5:35Speaker 03

  by far the most of any Western state. And there was something about Texans, no matter where on the frontier they went. Of the participants in those gunfights, more were born in Texas than in any other state. More died in Texas than anywhere else, too. And of the 15 deadliest gunfighters, 10 spent the bulk of their careers in Texas. Texas had this reputation even back then. As early as 1878, you could find New York newspaper editorials complaining about Texas-born gun violence. Writers from the East Coast would tour Texas and come back with tall tales of a place where everything was bigger and badder and scarier and deadlier. But there was some truth to it.

• 6:16Speaker 03

  One memoirist recalled a dinner where he'd asked 14 Texans how many had killed a man. Eight raised their hands. The frontier writer Emerson Howe wrote in 1907 that Texas was, quote, "the synonym for savagery." He wrote,

• 6:34Speaker 04

  "So many bad men of Texas have attained reputation far wider than their state, that it became a proverb upon the frontier that any man born on Texas soil would shoot, just as any horse born there would buck."

• 6:51Speaker 03

  Look at the shootouts in Tombstone and Dodge City. Build the kids New Mexico and Wild Bill Hickok's Abilene, and you'll always find Texans in the mix. I'd never appreciated how thoroughly Texans had infiltrated the rest of the frontier until I began learning about the frontier's first great business, open-range cattle ranching, which was dominated almost exclusively by Texas cowboys and Texas cattlemen. Virtually every cow that landed on a range, from Arizona to North Dakota, not only came first from South Texas, it usually came escorted by Texans. We'll talk more about this in coming episodes, but it was these roaming Texans, in a lot of ways, that helped make the West so wild.

• 7:34Speaker 03

  Here, we need to talk a bit about the technological advances that made that influence possible. Single-shot weapons, you know, muskets and flintlocks, had helped Americans conquer much of North America. But these were heavy weapons that took time to reload. In the 20 seconds it might take a soldier to reload a musket, a Comanche warrior could lose five or six arrows. For years, tinkerers had tried to solve the problem. In the early 1800s, the best they'd come up with were pistols that fired with multiple barrels. There were a few models out there like this with two or three barrels that you had to rotate by hand. None of them were all that great. Then, in 1831,

• 8:15Speaker 03

  a 17-year-old merchant seaman named Samuel Colt dreamed up a new design. Colt was this New England kid who loved to blow things up. When one of his pranks got him expelled from school, his father had him sent off to sea. On his journey, he heard soldiers musing about a gun that could fire five or six times. Colt sketched out a new kind of revolver, one where cocking the hammer also rotated the cylinder. He came back home and spent the next few years developing prototypes. By the end of 1837, he produced 1,000 of these revolving guns and sold precisely none. He finally managed to sell a few to the US Army and just over 100 more to the Texas Navy.

• 9:00Speaker 03

  By 1843, though, Colt was bankrupt. His factory closed. That same year, Texas phased out its navy, and those revolvers, which had hardly been used anyway, became surplus property. That's when Jack Hayes discovered the guns and had an idea they could give his Rangers the edge he wanted. The Rangers had been around since the first Texas settlements, back in the 1820s. First as an informal militia, later after the Revolution, more as a cavalry tasked with patrolling the Comanche frontiers. That day in 1844, in what became known as the Battle of Walker's Creek, Hayes and 14 of his men charged into 100 Comanches, firing these Colt revolvers left and right.

• 9:46Speaker 03

  The Comanche never stood a chance. 23 of them were killed, and just one Ranger. Years later, and I love this, a Comanche chief who was there was quoted saying, "I will never again fight Jack Hayes, who has a shot for every finger on the hand."

• 10:04Speaker 03

  It was the Rangers and the Comanche who first understood what a revolution these new revolvers represented. For the moment, though, no one else did. It wasn't until the Mexican-American war broke out two years later that others began to see it too. And it was actually all because one of the young Rangers who had fought at Walker's Creek. His name was Samuel Walker, and he'd nearly been killed that day, pinned to the ground by a Comanche lance. When the Mexican war broke out, a number of Rangers joined the fight down in South Texas. Sam Walker was among the first, leading daring nighttime raids behind enemy lines. In one battle, a cannonball knocked down Walker's horse, leaving him vulnerable as a Mexican

• 10:49Speaker 03

  lancer charged at him. Walker pulled his Colt, still had it, shot the lancer dead, then mounted the man's horse to jump back into battle. The press heard this and other stories, and Walker became an overnight celebrity, the first real hero of the war. His revolver too, shared the fame. At some point, Sam Colt wrote to him, asking what Walker thought of his guns. Walker replied, quote, "With improvements, I think they can be rendered the most perfect weapon in the world for light mounted troops." Sam Colt liked the sound of that, and over the next few months, the two men worked together closely to refine the revolver.

• 11:31Speaker 03

  The new version they came up with was stronger, made of English forged steel, easier to reload, with sharper sights, and six shots rather than five. It was also four and a half pounds and 15 inches long. Colt lamented, quote, "It would take a Texan to shoot it." With Walker as the pitchman, though, everything was different this time. Orders flooded in from the Army and many more who'd seen Walker in the press. Walker, by the way, didn't get to witness the immense changes his new gun would bring. He returned to the war in Mexico and was soon killed in battle. But the weapon he'd helped design, the Colt Walker, was already on its way to changing history.

• 12:14Speaker 03

  This was the first six shooter. And the weird thing is, though, the real change didn't begin in Texas, that'd come soon enough, but instead on a chaotic frontier opening half a continent away. Barely 90 days after Sam Walker's death, a man walking beside a sawmill in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada spied something sparkle in the river below. It was gold. It was California. Yes, yes, I know, this feels like a detour. I mean, California, really? Was it really even a part of the Old West? And the answer, to my surprise at least, when I first started looking at this years ago, is heck yeah.

• 12:57Speaker 03

  Back before the Civil War, before gunfighters were really a thing, California really was the first theater of the gunfighter age. It was the first place American civilians really began firing revolvers at each other. So many of the things we associate with the post-war gunfighter era, faceoffs with six shooters, hardcore outlaws, steely sheriffs, vigilantes stringing up bad guys, pretty much all that happened first in California during the 1850s. Some of the wildest gunfights in Old West history actually happened there, including what appears to be the single deadliest of all, a single man facing off against 14 bandits on a lonely mountain trail. I'll tell you about that in a sec. But first, let me just set the context here.

• 13:42Speaker 03

  It's hard to overstate the sheer anarchy that overwhelmed California after the discovery of gold in 1848. It was still just an American territory, remember, and in those first few years, there was next to no law enforcement at all. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of men from around the world were pouring in, and when crime necessarily grew out of control in early San Francisco and early LA, the citizenry naturally turned to vigilante justice, stringing up dozens of malfactors. Out in the goldfields, it was pretty much every man for himself, and with an awful lot of miners carrying around bags of gold dust, there was every reason to be wary. That gunfight I mentioned, here's a story.

• 14:27Speaker 03

  It happened in 1854. An Army veteran named Jonathan R. Davis was walking with two friends on a miners' trail out in El Dorado County, it's near Lake Tahoe, when they were ambushed by an outlaw gang of 14 men. The gang's first shots killed one of Davis's friends and badly wounded the other. Davis was a crack shot, armed with two colts and a bowie knife. He took cover and returned fire, picking off seven members of the gang. Four more of the men rushed him with bowie knives, and Davis drew his own. He stabbed one of them to death, lopped off another one's nose. The other two had already been wounded, and when they hobbled up, Davis stabbed them to death too.

• 15:10Speaker 03

  The three remaining bandits wisely ran off. Afterward, Davis found six holes in his hat. The whole thing was so hard to believe, he actually had to go to court with witnesses just to prove that it all really happened. Here, I want to give some credit to a couple of researchers who unearthed much of what we know about Davis and the other early California gunfighters. Much of this gold rush history, as we'll see, was pretty much forgotten for like 100 years, until the 1950s, when a commercial artist and history enthusiast in Fresno named William B. Seacrest started obsessively going back over old newspapers in his spare time, digging up these old gunfighter stories.

• 15:53Speaker 03

  Later, during the 80s, a San Francisco attorney named John Bosinecker began working alongside him. They found the Davis story and many others. Seacrest has since passed, but Bosinecker, to my money, is the dean of Western nonfiction writers these days. If you see one of his books, pick it up. His books are just excellent. A number of the most notable early California gunmen, it turns out, actually came from the South, wouldn't you know? One of the best known was Henry J. Talbot, known, due to his Native American ancestry, as Cherokee Bob. He'd come from Georgia, and he cut a striking figure in the mining camps with his long black hair, a beaver-trimmed coat and gloves, and his pistol and bowie knife.

• 16:37Speaker 03

  In 1854, Cherokee Bob knifed two men in an argument and was sent to the new San Quentin Prison. He made two violent attempts at escape, and then he was pardoned in 1860. He left California and carried on across the Mountain West, knifed a constable and wounded a deputy in Carson City, Nevada. In Washington State, he killed two soldiers in a brawl. In the town of Florence, in what's now Idaho, he and a pal picked a fight with two dance hall managers in the street. All four men drew pistols and fired. Cherokee Bob and his pal fell dead. I'd love to have known details of that one, for sure. Another of these gold rush outlaws was called Longhair Sam Brown.

• 17:21Speaker 03

  Sam Brown was a serious brute, with flowing red hair. He'd come west from Alabama through Texas. Legend sprung up about his odd, aggressive behavior, like one time he runs into this town shouting, "I want to eat a man for breakfast." Might have happened. Brown played cards, and his games had a way of turning violent. He killed five men before he finally was arrested and served time for manslaughter. When he got out, he moved on to Virginia City, Nevada, where he killed four more. In 1861, he finally threatened the wrong man, a German named Henry Van Sickle, who mounted up, chased Brown, and cornered him.

• 18:03Speaker 03

  The story goes that as Van Sickle leveled his shotgun and squeezed the trigger, in his thick German accent, he dispatched Brown with the immortal words, "Some, now I kills you."

• 18:23Speaker 01

  I'm holding in my hot little hand here, the first ever folding knife from Montana Knife Company. Dude, this thing is sweet. They like reimagined folding knives. You touch this thing and you know you are holding a quality product. Montana Knife Company, founded by Josh Smith, one of the most experienced master bladesmiths in the world. The Montana is the first folder Josh has built at production scale with a team of engineers and machinists who could match what he does on the bench. G10 scales with a 3D milled micro texture, titanium hardware, a custom deep carry clip with flathead screws set flush. This is a rock solid clip.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  It's not the kind of clip that you're going to use a couple of times and it bends and get all loose. The blade goes back into the mill after heat treatment for its most critical surfaces. That's the kind of step nobody else takes. That same standard applies to every part of the Montana, that's the name of the folder, the Montana, from start to finish. The wait is over, and I've been waiting a long time to get one of these suckers. MKC launching their first folding knife. It's dropping extremely soon, so make sure you sign up for email and SMS to be the first to know. These are going to sell out quick. Head to MKC.com today. That's MKC.com. Check engine, ABS or maintenance light on?

• 19:51Speaker 01

  Take the guesswork out of your warning lights with O'Reilly.

• 19:54Speaker 03

  Riley Veriscan. The service is free and provides a report with solutions verified by ASE certified master technicians. And if you need help, we could recommend a shop for you. Ask for O'Reilly Veriscan today.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  When you're in the back country, don't forget your own back country. Keep it pristine and confidently clean by bringing along wet extra large dude wipes. I'm glad to be doing dude wipe ads because I buy dude wipes anyways. I've been a long time dude wipe. I'm a dude wipe dude all the time. Just like your truck gets muddy out in the wild soaking your butt. You'd never clean your vehicle with dry paper towels. So why would you clean your butt with dry toilet paper? Wetter cleans better. So ditch the itch and switch from TP to wet extra large dude wipes. Love them. Like going on a 10 day moose hunt, I just bring a pack along. Not only that, so they're extra large. Okay. If you're a little baby, you get little baby wipes. If you're a man, you get extra large dude wipes. And when you're out in nature, it's going to inevitably call.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  So make sure you bring along wet dude wipes in three adventure sizes, like day hike, single wipes, 18 pack weekend wipers, or you know, for long trips, you got a 48 count pack. And it's not just that, like when you're out camping, just sleeping in a sleeping bag, let's say you're gone for 10 days, whatever. I use them just to clean up at night, like, you know, scrub the old pits, scrub your arms. If it's all dusty, just kind of get your neck and everything cleaned up. I love having them with me. Dude wipes, it is the best clean pants down. They're available at Amazon. That's where I usually order mine from is on Amazon. But you get them at Walmart nationwide. Fantastic product. Proud to be doing ads for these boys at dude wipes.

• 21:45Speaker 03

  More than anything though, what California had was bandits. In the 1850s, they pretty much roamed up and down the state at will, robbing miners in the north and rustling cattle in the south. The best known of them by far is the old west's most infamous Latino outlaw, Joaquin Murrieta. So great were the legends around Murrieta that some have claimed he never really existed, despite the fact that his severed head was displayed as a trophy after he was finally killed. Believe me, he existed. According to the legend though, he was spurred to a life of crime when American miners drove him off his claim, raped his wife and lynched his brother. Don't think that's what happened.

• 22:30Speaker 03

  The truth in fact appears to be a little simpler, though given the way Mexicans were treated in California at the time, it's easy to imagine that revenge was at least one of the things that drove him. Murrieta, it turns out, began riding with a band of outlaws led by his brother-in-law. A couple of years later, in 1852, he was implicated in the murder of General Joshua Bean, the first mayor of San Diego, and a brother of Judge Roy Bean, who would later become famous as the so-called law west of the Pecos. This murder accusation was the turning point in Murrieta's career. A vigilance committee strung up his brother-in-law and two close friends, and Murrieta headed north to start a gang of his own.

• 23:11Speaker 03

  He was 23, a smallest, fair-complected Sonoran with brown hair down to his shoulders, a wispy beard and a dark unibrow. He was about to orchestrate what one author has called "the bloodiest crime spree of the gold rush." He might've been the bloodiest in all the old west. In a two-month span, Murrieta's new gang rampaged through the mining towns, committing dozens of robberies and along the way murdering as many as 40 Chinese and Anglo miners. Everyone pleaded with the territorial government to try and do something. And in May, the state legislature responded by creating a temporary ranger service just to go after the gang.

• 23:55Speaker 03

  Its leader was a strapping six foot two former army scout named Harry Love. Love hired 21 men and together they spent six weeks riding across central California, interrogating various Mexicans. Eventually, they captured another brother-in-law of Murrieta's who described several of Murrieta's mountain hideouts.

• 24:19Speaker 03

  At daybreak on July 25th, 1853, Harry Love and his Rangers descended a winding canyon down onto the floor of the San Joaquin Valley. They could see smoke from a campfire. As the Rangers rode closer, an encampment came into view with people running everywhere. The Rangers charged in, guns drawn. The men, who appeared to mostly be Mexicans, had been caught totally by surprise. They stopped and put their hands up. One, a small young guy with a unibrow, stepped forward unarmed. He told the Rangers, "Talk to me. I am the leader of the band." One of the Rangers had seen Murrieta once before and he yelled to the others,

• 25:04Speaker 03

  "This is Joaquin, boys. We have got him at last."

• 25:09Speaker 03

  Just then, one or more of the Mexicans threw off their sarapis and opened fire. Murrieta ran for a horse, jumped on top of it and took it down a 15-foot embankment. Several Rangers chased him and opened fire. Two bullets struck the horse, which fell. Murrieta rolled free of the animal and kept running down a rocky arroyo. He made it maybe 30 yards before he was struck in the back by three bullets and fell. As the Rangers ran up, he spoke to them in Spanish.

• 25:39Speaker 05

  "No te disparas más."

• 25:41Speaker 03

  "Don't shoot anymore."

• 25:42Speaker 05

  "Estoy muerto."

• 25:43Speaker 03

  "I'm dead."

• 25:46Speaker 03

  And he was.

• 25:50Speaker 03

  There was a price on Murrieta's head, and so to claim his reward, Love had his head cut off. It was jammed into a jar and preserved with spirits and eventually became one of the most famous trophies of the old west, touring around the mining country before it finally came to rest in a gun shop in San Francisco. The shop and presumably the head of Joaquin Murrieta were destroyed in the earthquake of 1906. We have almost no details about the gunfights Murrieta engaged in. What we do know suggests he's one of those few early California gunmen who fits the mold of someone like a Wyatt Earp, who engaged in multiple gunfights of note. Almost all the rest of California's early gunfighters were forgotten.

• 26:35Speaker 03

  By the 1920s, when writers and Hollywood producers rediscovered a fascination with the old west, lots of bank and train robbers from like the 1880s were still around, but not many veterans of the gold rush were. That's just going on 70 years. And memories of them mostly faded away. The legacy of these early California gunfighters ends up being pretty much a dead end. There is one other batch of early gunfighters I should mention. This is a very rough group that cropped up after the gold rush in the early mining camps of Nevada and Montana. There weren't a lot of newspapers out there yet, so their careers are wreathed in legend and folklore, but a handful are still remembered in large part because of the man who was

• 27:20Speaker 03

  there to tell us about them. That would be Mark Twain. That's right, Mark Twain, probably the greatest American writer and chronicler of the late 1800s. Twain went west as a young man to work for one of the region's few newspapers. It was silver that drew people to Nevada, to the massive deposit discovered in 1859 known as the Comstock Load. The town at its heart was Virginia City. Twain lived and worked there for a couple of years in the early 1860s. Later, in his memoir, Roughing It, Twain advanced a description of Virginia City as maybe the first place in America, maybe the world, that truly embraced a culture that

• 28:01Speaker 03

  revolved around, wait for it, respect for murderers and murderers with guns, with revolvers. The top gunfighter in town was known as the chief. He reigned until someone killed him, usually. This is one of the first descriptions I can find of an emerging gunfighter culture in the old west. Twain wrote,

• 28:24Speaker 06

  "The reason why there was so much slaughtering done was that in the new mining district, the rough element predominates and a person is not respected until he has killed his man." That was the very expression used. "It was tedious work struggling up to a position of influence with bloodless hands. But when a man came with the blood of half a dozen men on his soul, his worth was recognized at once and his acquaintance sought."

• 28:51Speaker 03

  In a description that almost sounds like it came out of a Clint Eastwood movie, Twain describes a desperado who quote,

• 28:58Speaker 06

  "Moved along the sidewalk in successively long-tailed frock coat and shiny stump-toed boots, hat tipped over left eye."

• 29:08Speaker 03

  "As the folks in town scattered, induct and apologized." The most famous men in Nevada, Twain goes on, and apparently across the early Rockies, were gunfighters. We don't know much about most of them, but we do know about the most infamous one of all, a man sometimes called the first gunfighter. Twain first heard his name on the stagecoach he took west. He had the marvelous old west name of Jack Slade. In fact, according to Twain, Slade was almost the only thing his stagecoach drivers wanted to talk about. He wrote,

• 29:42Speaker 06

  "There was such magic to the name, Slade. Day or night now, I stood always ready to drop any subject in hand to listen to something new about Slade. He was at once the most bloody, the most dangerous and the most valuable citizen that inhabited the savage fastnesses of the mountains."

• 30:05Speaker 03

  Slade wasn't a lawman or an outlaw. He actually worked for the Stagecoach Company. He was called the Central Overland and he managed a 500 mile stretch of its route, from the Rockies back to the western Nebraska settlement of Kearney on the eve of the Civil War. I've seen him called "The Law West of Kearney," which is just so cool. In his heyday, in his late twenties, Slade is described as 5'8", about 160 pounds, with dark hair and a thin mustache. He was all business, we're told, when he was sober. But when he got to drinking, he became apparently a bit of a crazy man. They say he killed his first man in 1858 on a Stagecoach caravan en route to Salt Lake,

• 30:49Speaker 03

  either because the man laughed at him or because he was holding up the caravan. To keep order, it was said, he'd captured and strung up many others. Twain put the number at three to six men, which wouldn't surprise me. Much of Slade's legend sprang from a single incident involving this belligerent French-Canadian guy, a former station agent named Jules Benny, B-E-N-I. This was in northeast Colorado. Benny had been fired after billing the company for suspicious rewards he paid to supposedly recover stolen horses. Afterwards, he stuck around to run the little bodega beside the station. Apparently, he was not happy at this turn of events.

• 31:32Speaker 03

  A series of disagreements passed between Benny and Jack Slade, until one day, Jack Slade dropped by the makeshift restaurant Benny ran and ordered a plate of oysters. Yes, oysters were a thing in the old west, who knew? Anyway, no one really knows what started it. Maybe they got into it over some old complaints. Maybe the oysters were bad. Whatever the reason, Slade ended up tossing the entire tray in Benny's face. Later, he stalked away mad. Sometime later, Slade heard that Benny had sworn to fix him. Slade swore that if that was true, he would kill Benny. Still, he couldn't have been too worried because he went back to Benny's bodega without his gun. There were people standing around.

• 32:15Speaker 03

  It wasn't like Benny could just up and shoot him, but that is exactly what he did. As Slade approached, Benny emerged with a revolver. And in front of the witnesses, without saying a thing, he fired between three to six bullets into Slade's body. As Slade fell to the ground, Benny went inside, came back out now with a shotgun, and fired at Slade again. Benny then turned to the stunned crowd around him and said, and this has got to be one of the single greatest quips ever following an old west shooting. He gestured to one side and said,

• 32:47Speaker 05

  There are some blankets on the box. You can make a coffin for him if you like.

• 32:57Speaker 03

  Incredibly enough, Jack Slade somehow survived all this. An army surgeon rode 18 hours to tend to him, and by 1861, he was back on duty. Benny remained at large, wandering the Rockies somewhere, going around boasting that he was still gonna kill Jack Slade one of these days. Eventually, Slade put a reward on his head, and two of his men finally captured Benny after a gunfight and brought him back to Slade. There's a couple of versions of the story of what happened next. The most popular, most gruesome one goes like this. With Benny presented to him wounded and tied up, Jack Slade first fired a single shot at his foe. Then he went to a saloon for a drink.

• 33:41Speaker 03

  He returned and shot Benny a second time, then went back to the saloon for another drink. Then he went back and shot Benny again, then went for another drink, and on and on, till Benny was dead. Then, he cut off Benny's ears and kept them on his pocket watch as decorations. The book to read on all this, by the way, and it's really good, I recommend it highly, is Death of a Gunfighter: The Quest for Jack Slade, The West's Most Elusive Legend, by Dan Rottenberg. According to Rottenberg, Benny was already dead when they brought him in front of Slade. When one of Slade's men insisted he was only playing possum, Slade decided to check by walking over and cutting off Benny's ear. There was no reaction, and so Slade was satisfied.

• 34:25Speaker 03

  Almost satisfied, he still went and cut off Benny's other ear, and then, yes, kept them both on his pocket watch. It may not surprise you that Jack Slade's story does not end well. He began drinking more heavily. He got into a series of fights in Denver and elsewhere, shot up a store at Fort Halek, Wyoming, and got fired. On a two-day bender in Virginia City in 1864, he wrecked a pair of brothels, rode a horse into a saloon, and poured a bottle of wine down its throat, dumped a wagonload of milk, and took a judge hostage. Later, when he went on still another binge, he drew a crowd of fed-up miners who collared him and hanged him from the crossbar of a corral.

• 35:09Speaker 03

  Jack Slade went down as a western legend, thanks in no small part to Mark Twain. But Slade stood out, I think, because he was an outlier. I mean, there weren't many gunfighters like him in those early days. Next to the old west characters that came later, he would hardly stand out. In frontier Texas, I mean, that kind of thing with a station agent? I'm only half-serious here, but that's just a bad Saturday night. Thanks for listening, y'all. This has been episode three of The Gunfighters. Next time, we'll take you back to Texas, into some of its darkest corners, to begin

• 35:44Speaker 03

  to try and explain some of the hell Texans unleashed across the old frontier.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  You ever get that feeling, the walls closing in, the concrete jungle suffocating you? You crave some wide-open spaces, the chance to connect with nature, maybe in a spot all your own? Well, head over to land.com. They've got ranches, forests, mountains, streams, you name it. Search by acreage, you can search by location, you can search by the kind of hunting and fishing you're dreaming of. Land.com, it is where the adventure begins.

• 36:27Speaker 06

  Whether you're hiking in before first light, or crawling back into camp after a long day of field, a hot meal, or a strong cup of coffee can make the difference. The Jetboil Flash boils water in minutes and packs down small, making it an easy addition to your hunting kit. A lot of times on a hard hunt, I'll take a Jetboil with me, even if I'm not staying overnight, just because I want to have a midday coffee break, or have a midday hot meal when I bring some dehydrated food. Fast, compact, efficient. Jetboil helps you stay fueled for whatever the day brings. Use code GREECE at jetboil.com for 15% off your order. Some exclusions apply.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  When you're in the backcountry, don't forget your own backcountry. Keep it pristine and confidently clean by bringing along Wet Extra Large Dude Wipes. Just like your truck gets muddy out in the wild soaking your butt, you'd never clean your vehicle with dry paper towels, so why would you clean your butt with dry toilet paper? Wetter cleans better. So ditch the itch and switch from TP to Wet Extra Large Dude Wipes. Dude Wipes, it is the best clean pants down. They're available at Amazon, that's where I usually order mine from, but you get them at Walmart nationwide. Fantastic product, proud to be doing ads for these boys at Dude Wipes.

• 37:45Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.