Gun for hire Tom Horn passed the time awaiting trial in the office of the Laramie County Sheriff calmly plaiting a horse hair Mexican style riatta. |
Tom Horn is
a kind of litmus test of conflicting,
class driven, views of Western
history. Depending on who you ask the soft spoken man who
was hung for shooting a 14 year old boy
in the back and killing him was
a misunderstood hero, the beau ideal of a cowboy, lawman, and
range detective or a ruthless,
pitiless gun for hire.
These two visions are represented
in American culture by two iconic
but contrasting western
stories. Owen Wister’s The
Virginian had as its hero
the noble foreman of a great ranch who led a fight against rustlers
and thieves. Year later in
the classic film Shane, Alan
Ladd would play a drifter with a
past who would stand up to a cattle
baron on behalf of sod buster farmers.
In 1901 the days of the wild
and woolly frontier were fading fast,
even in Wyoming. After gaining statehood in 1890, the
bloody Johnson County War between the ranching barons of the Wyoming
Stock Growers Association and their small
hired army of gunslingers and plug-uglies and small ranchers and Homesteaders suspected
of throwing the occasional long lasso
over the necks of cattle had officially ended in 1892. That’s
when a local sheriff with the assistance
of the Cavalry rounded up the gang
of the gunmen besieging an isolated
ranch. They were hauled to
Cheyenne for trial. But oddly, while out on bail, all slipped
away.
Some of the nabobs of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association pose in front of their impressive headquarters building in Cheyenne. |
The plutocrats of
the Stock Growers Association and the state
government in the hands of their handpicked
officers laid low for a while in
their mansions and in the impressive headquarters that dominated
the city’s downtown. They helped establish Cheyenne Frontier Days,
the oldest municipal rodeo, to
celebrate the fading glory of the unchallenged Open Range and import tourists. By the turn of the
century some of them were toodling
around town in new-fangled and expensive automobiles. But despite
the appearance of modernity, they
had re-launched their old campaign
against small holders, on a scaled back level amounting to a low grade guerilla war.
Enter Tom
Horn.
Horn was born on a 600 acre
farm on the South Wyaconda River in northeast
Missouri’s Scotland County on November 21, 1860. He was
about in the middle of a pack of twelve
children. Not much is known about his childhood other than it was probably pretty typical of any in its time
and place.
By age 16, like many younger sons with a streak
of adventure and no hope of
inheriting the family farm, Tom headed west. He knocked around the Southwest
picking up the skills of a cowboy.
In 1883 he was enlisted as a civilian Cavalry scout under Albert
Sieber for General George Cook’s campaign against Chiricahua Apaches under Geronimo.
The German born Sieber
took the young man under his wing
and mentored him, even taught him to speak German, as well a
much tracking and trailing lore.
The Scouts accompanied Cook when he illegally crossed into Mexico seeking
the elusive Geronimo in the Santa Madre Mountains. In 1886, after
Geronimo and a handful of followers escaped Cook’s custody, Horn was assigned
to a small contingent commanded by Captain Henry Lawton of B
Troop, 4th Cavalry and First Lieutenant Charles B.
Gatewood to once again go into Mexico. The Mexican’s hated Geronimo,
but were also sensitive about their
sovereignty. Horn was wounded
when local militia attacked his camp. Later he killed his first known man, and the
only one in a stand-up idealized western
gun duel—a dust up with a Mexican officer at a cantina.
Tom Horn in his glory days as an Army Scout hunting for Geronimo. |
When Lt. Gatewood finally found Geronimo’s
camp with Horn’s help, Seiber was elsewhere. It was Horn who translated at the delicate negotiations that resulted in the old chief’s final surrender.
At loose
ends after the essential end of
the Indians wars in the Southwest,
Horn drifted back into cowboying
then staked a mining claim. It
did not take long however, for him to enter the Arizona Pleasant Valley War as
a hired gun. But it is not
clear to which side he sold his services. Also known as
the Tonto Basin Feud it was a long
running conflict between to large ranching families, the half-Indian Tewksburys
and the Grahams over land and
water rights as well as mutual
rustling. It had been a deadly affair since 1882 and intensified in
’86 when the Tewksbury’s introduced
sheep to the range.
In his autobiography
Horn said he joined in the pursuit of rustlers, which could refer to either party. But given
his later proclivity for cattle
ranchers and enmity toward Indians
it is likely that he accepted the pay
of the Grahams. Both families and their employees were victims of several unsolved slayings,
some of them perhaps by Horn acting as a “regulator”.
Taken together, both families were nearly
wiped out and the conflict has been called the deadliest feud in American history, far outstripping the body count of the Hatfields and McCoys
or the earlier Arizona Lincoln County War made famous by Billy the
Kid. Killing continued into the early 1892 when the last Tewksbury killed the last Graham.
Sporadically during and after the Pleasant
Valley war, Horn also served as a deputy
sheriff prized for his unmatched skill as a tracker. He
served under three of the most famous
Southwest lawmen, William
“Buckey” O’Neill, later a Captain
in the Rough Riders killed in Cuba; long haired Commodore
Perry Owens of Apache County; and former Confederate Glenn
Reynolds. Each of them, at one time or another, intervened in the
Feud and Horn’s status as deputy may
likely have been paid for by one or the
other side when posse went after the
other.
Horn’s exploits
as a gun for hire and erstwhile lawmen became celebrated enough to come to the attention of the Pinkerton
Detective Agency which hired him in 1890 as one of its operatives out
of the Denver office.
He specialized in tracking down those that stole
effectively from the rich—rustlers, train,
and bank robbers. In his most
famous case he tracked Thomas Eskridge “Peg-Leg” Watson and Burt
“Red” Curtis who were suspected of a
robbery of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad in August of 1890 all
the way from Colorado to a hideout in
Oklahoma Territory. His orders
were to bring the men in. He
and his partner took the men “with no
trouble and without firing a shot.”
Horn by this time considered himself a professional. He held no personal animus to any of the men he
relentlessly tracked down. As
a professional he did what he was
ordered. If the Agency wanted the publicity of nabbing two semi-famous outlaws and bringing them to justice, he was the man for the job. It the Agency or
its wealthy clients preferred that their problems be eliminated, Horn had no trouble with that either. Some
of the men he hunted ended up dead,
generally shot from ambush in ways
in which the killing could not be linked
to the shooter, the company, or the client.
Horn considered
himself honorable and consoled any
qualms of conscience by telling himself he was working for if not law, then
at least some sort of rough justice.
By 1894, however, too many people were ending up dead in Horn’s vicinity. He resigned from the Pinkertons under pressure. It was not that the
agency was displeased with the results of his work. When one of the best known of Pinkerton’s western
operatives, Charlie Siringo who had worked
closely with Horn published a memoir Two Evils Anarchism and
Pinkertonism he claimed that, referring to one case that “William Pinkerton told me that Tom Horn was guilty of the crime, but that his
people could not allow him to go to
prison while in their employ.”
A Wyoming Stock Growers Association Range Detective Badge like Horn sometimes wore during the Johnson County War. |
Although no longer an employee, Horn would
continue to sometimes work with the
agency and was sometimes contracted
by them to work on specific cases in his new role as an independent Range Detective for hire. One of his most reliable clients was the Wyoming Stock
Growers Association, the biggest
employer of hired gunmen in the West. They put him to work on cases
in the Johnson County War.
He was thought
by many to be among the gunmen who killed Nate Champion the leading spokesman of the small ranchers
that the Association accused of rustling. Champion was the first victim of the all-out war. He was besieged in his cabin at the KC
Ranch where he held off a posse
of 200 sheriff’s deputies and Association gunmen for hours, keeping while keeping a journal of the battle.
He was cut down by fire from five men,
allegedly including Horn, when he ran
from the cabin on April 9, 1892.
It was sheer
luck that Horn was not among the Association gunmen arrested later that year—he was off working, as he generally
preferred, alone and independently at the time.
In 1895, now an independent agent for the
Association, we was accused of killing William Lewis near Iron
Mountain, Wyoming and six week later another alleged rustler,
Fred Powell. He avoided being charged in both cases due to the powerful political influence of the
Association. The following year a small rancher named Cambell, who had just sold some cattle and was caring a large amount of cash, vanished after last being seen in the company of Horn. There were other
murders or disappearances on the range in those years. Horn may or may not have been involved—he
was not the only gunman on the
loose, just the most notorious.
Still, occasionally Pinkerton would call on
Horn to investigate real criminals.
He was contracted to investigate the Wilcox train robbery, committed by members of Butch Cassidy’s Hole in
the Wall Gang. He identified two members of the gang, George Curry
and Kid Curry as the likely killers of Sheriff Josiah Hazen who
had been shot in pursuit of the gang.
He passed the information on to
Pinkerton Siringo.
Patriotically, Horn, like many
westerners, volunteered in the Army
for the Spanish American War. Before he could ship out to Cuba,
however, he was struck down by malaria,
which was rampant among the troops,
in Tampa. He never got to
see action and it took some time
for him to recover his health.
Back in Wyoming by 1899, Horn was working
for the Swan Land and Cattle Company and was known to have killed two
rustlers, Matt Rash and Isom Dart. A year later, working in
Colorado, he was suspected in the
ambush killing of two other suspected cattle thieves.
In 1901 he was employed by cattle baron
John C. Coble. He was working around an old stomping ground, Iron Mountain, when his attention was drawn to small rancher
named Kels Nickell who was running sheep on the range.
Horn's Winchester 73 that he was carrying when arrested was too small a caliber weapon to have inflicted the wounds on Willie Nickell, but he had three larger caliber cartridges in his pocket. |
On July 18, 1901 Nickell’s 14 year old son Willie
was shot from ambush twice while opening
a gate at his father’s ranch. Two
bullets tore completely through
his body, one piercing his back and
another entering his shoulder and
traversing his body sideways and down, indicating that he was either twisting from the impact of the first round,
or as some later investigators believe, hit by a round from a second shooter.
A few days later Willie’s father was also shot and wounded.
Horn was known to be in the area and
interested in the Nickells. He left
immediately after the shooting. A year later, drunk and supposedly remorseful for killing the
boy instead of his father, Horn allegedly confessed to an old acquaintance Joe
Lefors, a deputy U.S. Marshall.
Although many would later question the
confession, he was charged with the
murder.
When arrested he had in his possession a Winchester
Model 73 lever action rifle, too
small a caliber to have been used in
the Nickell murder. But he had in
his pocket two rounds for larger
caliber rifles, either of which might have been capable of producing Willie’s wounds. With no eye witnesses, this circumstantial evidence, the questionable and recanted confession, and the knowledge
that his employer had targeted the Nickell ranch, was all prosecutor Walter Stoll had to go on.
It turned
out to be enough. The public was
getting sick of continued violence
on the range, and all of the Stock Growers Association political clout could
not, for once, get around it.
Whatever the case, the jury returned a verdict of guilty.
Horn’s appeal to the Wyoming
Supreme Court failed. Tom
Horn was going to hang.
All the time Horn was sitting in his jail cell he serenely
passed his time braiding a two color horse hair riata in the old Southwest style. He was visited frequently by Miss Kimmell who gathered from their conversations and
Horn’s notes the material for the publication of Horn’s Autobiography
in Denver in 1904. Horn also visited and freely, but
modestly conversed with reporters
and even visiting celebrities
including Heavyweight Boxing Champion Gentleman Jim Corbet. His quiet, pleasant demeanor impressed
many visitors. He just didn’t
seem like a hardened killer.
None-the-less, Horn was hung in Cheyenne on
November 20, 1903. He was just past
his 43rd birthday.
Since then Horn has lapsed into folk hero/villain status. He was the subject of several western novels and stories either under his own name or inspiring thinly veiled characters. At least one totally fiction western movie, Fort Utah staring John Ireland in 1967 cast him as a hero. Best known is
Tom Horn released in 1980 with Steve McQueen sympathetically portraying him as a man
lost out of his time and confused by the emerging modern world.
David Carradine played him in a made for TV movie, Mr. Horn a
year earlier. And the History Channel produced a documentary claiming to clear Horn of
this particular murder, or cast doubt on
guilt.
Western historians are divided on the
case. A good many believe that despite the scant evidence, Horn was probably guilty. Others believe
that he accidentally killed the boy
intending to kill the father and many of these would have excused the execution of the older man as
rough range justice. Others believe he may have only been peripherally involved by perhaps fingering the Nickells for another
shooter or abetting the Miller
family. Some think he may have been
one of two shooters. Others buy the two shooter theory but believe it was
the work of the Millers. And decedents
of the old cattle barons and their defenders
still maintain that Horn was entirely
innocent and the victim of
persecution by small rancher/rustlers and a lynch mob of public opinion.
Take your pick.
As for me, however sympathetic and compelling he or Steve McQueen might have been, Tom
Horn was a killer who was bound someday for the noose—even if he
didn’t shoot Willie Nickell.
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