Life on the open
range could be a discomforting experience, what with outlaws popping out of the
woodwork with the slightest provocation, nesters “accidentally” mistaking some
cattleman’s range for the quarter section they’d purchased, steers stampeding
wherever they pleased, and wild animals running amok in settlers’ vegetable
gardens—not to mention all those Indians to keep track of.
Things weren’t
much easier for townies. For one thing, outlaws didn’t confine themselves to
the countryside. Drunks stumbled out of saloons with reckless abandon, ladies
of questionable virtue roamed the streets at will, and barbers pulled teeth or
performed surgery like they knew what they were doing. Even church socials
sometimes got out of hand.
At least folks in
town could count on the law to keep things somewhat under control, right?
Not always.
Finding a reliable
lawman was anything but easy. El Paso, Texas, discovered that when it hired Dallas
Stoudenmire as city marshal. Stoudenmire, a deadly gunman with a mean
temper and a fondness for strong drink, insisted on starting fights and
shooting people—some of them criminals. As a young man, famed lawman Wyatt Earp
stole horses. Between gigs as a county sheriff, town marshal, and city policeman,
Earp gambled, owned brothels, got arrested for a number of crimes, broke out of
jail, led a vigilante group, and otherwise made a nuisance of himself. Pat
Garrett may have been a straight arrow legally speaking, but he was unpleasant
to be around. Even his fellow officers objected to his disposition: a
refreshing mixture of arrogance and surliness.
Some men found a
badge to be an excellent disguise for nefarious activities. Take these guys,
for example:
Henry Plummer
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| Henry Plummer |
In 1856, at the
age of 24, Plummer became the marshal of Nevada City, Calif., the third-largest
settlement in the state. In 1859, the marshal killed the husband of a woman
with whom he was having an affair. Sentenced to ten years in San Quentin, he received
parole in six months and immediately joined a gang of stagecoach robbers.
In January 1862,
Plummer formed his own gang and began hijacking wagons transporting gold out of
mining camps. When that enterprise petered out in January 1863, Plummer
relocated to the newest gold rush in Bannack, Montana. There, he formed the
Innocents, a network of road agents that numbered more than 100 men within a
few short months.
In May 1863,
Plummer lost a sheriff election and subsequently threatened his rival until the
man high-tailed it, fearing for his life. Plummer took over the sheriff’s job
and right away appointed two of his Innocents cronies as deputies. Oddly, crime
dramatically increased. In about nine months, more than 100 murders occurred
and robberies, assaults, and assorted other crimes reached unprecedented
levels. All the while, Plummer—under the guise of cracking down on lawlessness—hanged
witnesses.
On January 10,
1864, having had enough law enforcement for a while, fifty to seventy-five
vigilantes rounded up Plummer and his two deputies and hanged them in the
basement of a local store.
Burt Alvord and Billy Stiles
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| Burt Alvord, Yuma Territorial Prison, 1904 |
In the 1890s,
Alvord and Stiles served as deputy sheriffs in Willcox, Arizona. Unsatisfied
with their salaries, the two began robbing Southern Pacific Railroad trains to
supplement their income. Emboldened by pulling a number of successful jobs, they
undertook their most daring escapade on September 9, 1899, in what came to be
known as the Cochise Train Robbery. Instead of cleaving to tradition and
stopping the train on a lonely stretch of track in the middle of nowhere,
Alvord and Stiles had five members of their gang blow up the safe while the
train was stopped in the town of Cochise. Alvord and Stiles, maintaining their
law-enforcement decorum, were part of the posse that unsuccessfully attempted
to apprehend the robbers in the Chiricahua Mountains.
About five months
later, on February 15, 1900, the gang struck again, in broad daylight in the
tiny town of Fairbank, Arizona. While the train was stopped at the station, the
Alvord-Stiles gang approached the express car, guns drawn, only to find the
messenger responsible for the safe unwilling to abide such rude behavior. During
the gunfight that erupted, two of the five gang members were wounded and one
ran away. The messenger, also wounded, hid the safe’s key before losing
consciousness. Unable to find the key and without a single stick of dynamite
between them, the rest of the gang scrammed.
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| Fairbank, Ariz., railroad depot, circa 1900 |
Once again,
Alvord and Stiles rode with a posse to track down the outlaws, one of whom was
injured so badly he had to be left behind about six miles outside town. Despite
Alvord’s and Stiles’s attempts to misdirect the pursuers, they stumbled across
the wounded man, who fingered Alvord as the ringleader before he died. Stiles
confessed and turned state’s evidence, allowing him to remain comfortably outside
the bars while Alvord cooled his heels inside. A short while later, Stiles
broke Alvord out of the pokey and the two of them lit out for Mexico.
The Arizona
Rangers invaded Mexico and, in 1904, engaged the two now-expatriates in a gun
battle. They captured Alvord, but Stiles got away. After a brief stint in the
Rangers under an assumed name, Stiles was killed a few years later while
working as a lawman in Nevada, also under an assumed name. Alvord did two years
in Yuma Territorial Prison and beat it for Panama upon his release.
H.D. Grunnels
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| Steam train, 1898 |
In 1898, Fort Worth, Texas, Assistant Police Chief Grunnels talked a gang of Oklahoma bank robbers out of robbing a local diamond merchant and into robbing a train in Saginaw, Texas, instead. Grunnels masterminded the operation, planning to apprehend the bandits after they made off with the money, then collect the reward and keep the loot.
The Apple Dumpling Gang might
have performed the train heist with more aplomb. While crawling across the top
of the coal tender to reach the engine, the gang’s leader slipped and
accidentally discharged his pistol. His minions mistook the misfire as their
signal to hop on the train and commence whatever mischief their roles required.
Chaos ensued.
Meanwhile,
Grunnels and a cadre of Fort Worth police officers not in on the plan raced to
the rescue of a train that had yet to be robbed. The discombobulated robbers
vamoosed. The Fort Worth Police Department became suspicious when it discovered
Grunnels reached the scene of the crime before the crime had been reported.
Grunnels was fired and indicted, but he disappeared before trial.
