Tag Archives: Old West

Sites of Disorder.

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N.C. Wyeth, Gunfight in a Western Saloon, 1916. 

            My Old Man comes home from the war.  Gets a job working in the purchasing department of a Standard Oil office in Seattle.  That palls after a few years, so he quits, goes to Sun Valley, gets work in a resort restaurant, and spends the rest of the time skiing.  Lives cheap and saves money.  When the season ends, he takes the long route back to Seattle.[1]  Probably goes to Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.  He liked to play poker and he was good at it, so places with gambling appealed to him. 

            One time, he’s in San Francisco.  Heard about a game upstairs above a restaurant in Chinatown.  Round-eyes are welcome.  So he goes.  Old building, with authentic versions of all the BS decorations you see in modern Chinatowns.  Wide double doors next to the entrance to the restaurant.  An equally wide wooden staircase leading up to a landing, then the staircase turned right to the “gambling den.”  Landing is decorated with this big ornamental Chinese grill on the wall facing down the first set of stairs to the front doors.  He’s hustling up the stairs, glances to his left at the grill.  There’s a little room behind the grill.  Sitting in a chair looking out is this big Chinese guy.  He’s got a sawed-off double barrel shotgun across his lap.  He’s a Loss Prevention Specialist. 

Kind of reassuring.  Private gambling establishments weren’t legal.  Cops were paid to look the other way, but you couldn’t call the cops if someone ripped you off.  (Same with prostitution and drugs.)  Lots of cash on hand, between the house and the gamblers.  So, if a bunch of guys in overcoats and fedoras came bursting through the front door and hurried up the steps with their hands in their coat pockets, they were liable to catch a double load of double-O.[2] 

Another time he’s in a bar in Seattle, having a drink.  Not a really elegant place, so to speak.[3]  One of the other patrons starts to get quarrelsome.  Bouncer appears, grabs up the guy, and shoves him out of the door.  Tranquility returns.  Later, there’s a knock at the door (that kind of place) and the bouncer goes to open the door.  The previously-discharged patron has returned.  Bouncer slams the door shut, but the guy already has one arm inside the door.  He’s holding a .45-cal. Colt semi-automatic pistol.[4]  He can’t get in—or out, come to that—because the bouncer is putting all his weight against the door.  So he fires off the entire magazine until the slide locks back.  I forget what my old man told me happened next.  Thing is, everybody inside the bar was on the floor from the first instant they saw the gun.  Trying to get behind something solid. 

In any case, “places of ill repute” got that way, in part, because they were attended by “disorder.”  Wyeth is giving us a close-up view of just how bad bad behavior could get. 

[1] Where he picks up work driving a cab and, later, teaching people to drive.

[2] Best I understand it, each 12-gauge shotgun shell loaded with buck shot contains twelve 30-cal. balls.  For a view of the effects, there’s a posthumous photograph of the outlaw Bill Doolin at Doolinbody – Bill Doolin – Wikipedia   

[3] I could have said “if you know what I mean.”  However, even I don’t know what I mean exactly because middle-class people these days don’t have any real idea of what a “dive bar” of the old kind was like.  Well, maybe you do, even if I don’t.  There’s a place down the street, a hole in the wall place.  Sells $3 pints of beer.  However, I heard one co-ed say “After classes this afternoon, I’m going to Milo’s.”  So, not the sort of place that would appear in a Raymond Chandler novel.  And Chandler had drunk in most kinds of places.  Like Joseph Roth. 

[4] Things were all over the place after the war.  Soldiers, especially officers, declared them “lost in battle.”  William Manchester, the writer, threw his into a river during the late Sixties when he grew horrified by senseless violence.  My father-in-law had his from the Navy.  One time his wife wakes him up at night, says “Alec, I think someone is looking in the window.”  He rolls over and reaches under the bed to where he kept the gun.  Fired a shot through the window, then went back to sleep.  Defense Department sold off tons of them as “War Surplus.”  Same for the M-1 carbine.  Gun dealers advertised it as a “light sporting rifle.”  Somebody, nobody knows for sure who, shot Ben Siegel in Hollywood.  Bunch of times.  With a guy like that, you’d want to be sure.  Then there were the Lugers. 

Range War.

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            “Tick, tick, tick” went frontier New Mexico.  The United States had seized New Mexico from Old Mexico in 1846, and then corralled most of the Indians on reservations around a chain of Army forts.  Neither the original Hispanic population nor the Indians were happy with the new lords of the land.  The few Anglo immigrants scrambled to make a living.  Crime at the expense of the government provided the main income.  The treaties with the Indians had promised them food in return for living on the reservations.  Ranchers raised cattle for sale to the government; the government gave the beef to the Indians.  The contracts to supply beef were controlled by the territorial government in Santa Fe, so corruption held one key to wealth.  Delivering short weight held another.  The ranchers and their cowboys needed other things (food, clothes, tools, booze, guns), so the widely-spaced towns each had a general store.  The ranches provided enough business to support one local store, but not two.  One store could exploit its monopoly to charge high prices; two stores would end in bankrupting both.  Tension mounted between storeowners, and between them and ranchers.  Finally, some cowboys stole cattle off ranches and sold them cheap to men with government beef contracts.  The thieves were outlaws, but the buyers didn’t want them caught.  Law books, store ledgers, and guns were all equally useful in getting ahead. 

            So it was in Lincoln County, New Mexico Territory in 1876.  Two Irish immigrants (Lawrence Murphy, James Dolan) owned the general store, a big ranch, and the county sheriff (yet another Irishman, William Brady).  John Chisum, a big rancher up from Texas, disliked their monopoly.  Alex McSween, once their lawyer, just disliked them.  John Tunstall, a dopey immigrant from Britain, saw an opportunity in November 1876.  He bought a ranch and, with McSween opened a rival store in the town of Lincoln.  Murphy and Dolan fought back.  They mortgaged the store to backers in Santa Fe to get the cash to out-last Tunstall; they papered him with lawsuits; and they hired some outlaws to rustle his cattle.  Tunstall and McSween hired their own group of wild young men, who called themselves “The Regulators,” to guard the herd and Tunstall himself.  The last bit didn’t work out too well: a group of outlaws “deputized” by Sheriff Brady murdered Tunstall on 18 February 1878. 

            The “Lincoln County War” was on.  The Regulators killed two of Tunstall’s assassins on 9 March, Sheriff Brady and a deputy in Lincoln on 1 April, another of the suspected killers on 4 April, four outlaws associated with Murphy and Dolan on 30 April, and yet another enemy on 15 May.  Two of the Regulators died in these fights.  A four day gun-fight in Lincoln from 15 to 18 July left McSween, his law partner, two Regulators, and two of their opponents dead.  Murphy died of cancer in October.  Most of the Regulators fled to other parts, ending the “War.” 

            The few remaining Regulators turned to rustling cattle under the leadership of William Henry McCarty, called “Billy the Kid.”  In November 1880 Pat Garrett won election as Lincoln County Sheriff on a promise to get rid of the rustlers.  Garret captured Billy on Christmas Eve Day.  Convicted and sentenced to death for killing Sheriff Brady, Billy escaped from the Lincoln County jail after killing two guards in April 1881.  Garrett again tracked Billy, then killed him at Old Fort Sumner, New Mexico in July 1881. 

            The larger pattern went on the same.  Dolan bought up Tunstall’s property; McSween’s widow built a cattle empire; Billy’s lawyer, Albert Fountain, struggled with Albert Fall for political and economic control of Lincoln County.  In 1896 Fall’s gunmen murdered Fountain.  Pat Garrett led the investigation, but the killers—defended by Fall—escaped conviction.  In 1908 men linked to Fall killed Garrett.  In 1912 Fall became a Senator, in 1921 Secretary of the Interior.  In 1929 he went to prison in a bribery scandal—for using public lands for private gain.