A real Calamity—Martha Jane's Myth and Mundane Reality in the Old West

 One of the most widely seen photographs of Calamity Jane taken in 1885 when she was 33 years old and already exploiting a growing public reputation,  Commonly used by debunkers to counter the glamorized portrayals in fiction and film.

Calamity Jane is a semi-mythical character out of the rootin’ tootin’ Wild West famous for being famous.  She is a character with serious schizophrenia.  On the one hand she has been portrayed as just an All-American Tom Boy with a crush on Wild Bill Hickok in innumerable novels and movies.  She was portrayed by Jean Arthur opposite Gary Cooper in Cecil B. DeMille’s wildly inaccurate The Plainsman, by busty Jane Russell in the Bob Hope farce The Paleface, by chipper Doris Day in the musical romp Calamity Jane, and more grimly by Ellen Barkin in Wild Bill.  Angelica Huston got a crack at the part in the TV miniseries based on Larry McMurtry’s Buffalo Girls opposite Sam Eliot’s Hickok.  Jane Alexander played her in the western cum family tearjerker TV movie also called Calamity Jane.

On the other hand, there are the professional western de-bunkers who depict Calamity as a vicious bull dyke, prostitute, drunk, and an inveterate liar who made up most of her alleged exploits.  The latter, in the age of tearing down icons, is increasingly the more popular view these days and frequently gets expressed in books, articles, and in portrayals like that of Robin Weigert in the fine, profane HBO mini-series Deadwood.  These portrayals paint her as ugly based on photographs taken of her when she was trying to exploit her image to make a living.

Perky Doris Day, like Jean Artur before her portrayed Calamity as a loveable all American Tomboy in a real romance with Wild Bill.

So, who was the real Calamity?  

Well, the debunkers have the evidence of her death on August 1, 1903.  She was carried dead drunk from a train at Belle Fouche, South Dakota where she had been working as a cook in a brothel operated by an old friend, madam Dora DuFran and taken to the Calloway Hotel in Terry, South Dakota, where she hemorrhaged and died at the presumed age of 51.

At her request her body was returned to her old stomping grounds in Deadwood and buried next to Hickok in Mount Moriah Cemetery high on a hill overlooking the city.  She reportedly made the request, which was honored by her friends who raised money for the grave site and a monument, because she claimed that “Bill was the only man I ever loved.”  Both graves are a popular tourist pilgrimage sites to this day.

She started out as Martha Jane Canary on May 1, 1852 to a hardscrabble farmer in Mercer County, Missouri just south of the Iowa border.  She was the eldest of a family that grew to include five more children.

Little is known of her early life.  After the Civil War in 1865 her father packed the family into a covered wagon and lit out for Virginia City, the gold mining boom town and new capital of Montana Territory.  The trek took more than six arduous months.  Later in her fictionalized and ghost written Autobiography she claimed that at age 14 on the trip she rode the family horse bare back and honed her skills as hunter to provide meat for the cooking pot. Her mother died of “washboard pneumonia” along the route and was buried at Blackfoot, Montana.

Her father was unable to get established in Montana and after a year relocated the family to the Salt Lake Valley where he tried to eke at a living on a 40 acre dust farm on land the Mormons didn’t want.  He died in 1867 leaving teenaged Martha to support the family.

This photo taken in what she later referred to as the "uniform of my sex" circa 1880 hints at the attractive young girl described in the earliest accounts of Martha Jane Canary in the west by those who actually knew her

She loaded up the wagon and headed east to Fort Bridger, Wyoming where she sold the rig and piled the family onto a Union Pacific train that took them to near-by Piedmont, a railroad boom town whose main industry was lumbering and cutting ties for construction of the Transcontinental Railway.  Jane and her family stayed in the town until 1874 and she supported the brood by taking any jobs she could find—dishwasher, a cook, a waitress, a dance-hall girl (prostitute), a nurse, and an ox team driver.  Despite her later reputation as ugly, at this point in her life she was described as extremely attractive and as a “pretty dark-eyed girl.”  She still wore conventional women’s clothing including what finery she could assemble to attract customers to her dance hall/brothel duties.

According to her suspect autobiography, Martha Jane began her association with the Army in 1870 when she claimed to have enlisted as a Scout under Lt. Colonel George Armstrong Custer (still called General by some because of his brevet Civil War) rank at Fort Russell in Cheyenne.  She thus coupled her identity with a famous name.  But the story is impossible.  Custer was never stationed at Ft. Russell and troops from there were not dispatched to Arizona for an Indian campaign where she claims to have served a Scout.  Since Scouts generally needed to be familiar with the territory in which they were operating and a good knowledge of the tribes they were fighting, a youthful girl with no experience in the Southwest would hardly have been enlisted.

Some historians date her involvement with the Army to 1872 under General George Crook at Fort Fetterman, one of the string of posts north of Ft. Laramie meant to enforce the terms of the Sioux Treaty of 1868 which ended Red Cloud’s War.  She was certainly active there and at other posts by 1874.

Her service was not likely as a Scout, except perhaps unofficially.  She was a teamster, a job critical to logistical support of both the permanent posts and operations in the field.  It was during this period that she began adopting men’s clothing, certainly more suitable attire for her work than the cumbersome dresses and skirts of the era.

One Cavalry officer who would have known her during this period, Captain Jack Crawford, told a Montana newspaper after Jane died that she “never saw service in any capacity under either General Crook…never was in an Indian fight. She was simply a notorious character, dissolute and devilish, but possessed a generous streak which made her popular.”

Popular she was on those isolated posts where the men were amused by her ability to curse like the mule skinner she was, drink and carouse the best of them, and probably liberally bestow her sexual favors for fun and profit.

She was beginning to establish a “reputation” and stories circulated.  About this time, she acquired the nick name Calamity.  She claimed it was for rescuing wounded Captain Egan after a running Indian fight outside a small post at Goose Creek, Wyoming about 1872.  This seems to have been a wholly invented yarn.  Other times she told people it was because she warned men that it would be a “risking calamity to offend her.” An old timer recalling her probably got closest to the truth when he told the St. Louis Post Dispatch that, “She got her name from a faculty she has had of producing a ruction at any time and place and on short notice.”

Calamity during her brief stay as part of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.

As a teamster Jane visited many posts and may have taken to the field in the baggage train of active campaigns.  She evidently accompanied troops to the Black Hills for the first time in 1874 and was there again the following year.  It was at this time she may—or may not—have made the acquaintance of William Fredrick Cody, the Scout known as Buffalo Bill who would figure in the legends and yarns about her and briefly later employ her in his Wild West Show.

She wintered over at Ft. Laramie where she worked at the Three-Mile Hog Ranch brothel as a prostitute, and reportedly one of the establishment’s top attractions.

At least one instance of her acting in the role of a scout has been verified by contemporary accounts.  In the spring of 1875 accompanying Crook on a second march to the Big Horn.  She was entrusted with “important dispatches.”  She swam the Platte River and made a 90 mile ride soaking wet to Ft. Fetterman to deliver the message.  At the Fort she was taken ill, probably with pneumonia and had to be nursed back to health.  It was on the basis of this confirmed episode that many years after her death the Army granted pension survivor benefits to a woman claiming to be her daughter.

Calamity spent another winter at Ft. Laramie and at her employment at the Hog Ranch before signing on as a Teamster on a Charles Utter wagon train heading north with supplies for the rogue boomtown of Deadwood.  It was on this trip that she met Hickok, a fellow teamster and a meat hunter for the expedition.  They arrived in town in July of 1876.  Jane had enough of a reputation that the Black Hills Pioneer reported “Calamity Jane has arrived.”

Calamity first worked in Dora Dufran's Deadwood brothel when the madame was only 15 years old.  They remained life-long friends and Dufram employed Calamity in various capacities over the years including a final job at her Belle Fouche, South Dakota whorehouse as a cook/dishwasher and tourist curiosity.

She was smitten with Hickok and he was friendly with her, standing her to drinks in the local saloons.  When he decided to stay and take the local miner’s gold at the poker table, Jane decided to stay too, riding mail dispatches to and from Ft. Custer, operating a freight hauling business, and servicing customers for Dora DuFran.

Jane’s later claims that she married Hickok in Benton, Montana in 1873 and that he fathered her daughter Jean, despite being honored by the Army claims board in 1941, were impossible.  Hickok married Agnes Thatcher Lake, who operated a circus in Cheyenne in March, just before joining the wagon train where he did meet Calamity.

Hickok was famously shot in the back of the head at a poker table in Deadwood on August 2.  Jane later claimed to have personally hunted down his killer, Jack McCall and “arrested” him armed with a meat clever.  It wasn’t true.  She was so depressed by the killing that she drank herself in a stupor, not an unfamiliar condition.

 

Calamity at the grave of Wild Bill Hickok on Mt. Moriah in Deadwood.  She later had copies of this photograph made into postcards which she sold to tourists and at attempts to exhibit herself  on the stage to make a living.  Her dying wish was realized and her remains were buried next to Hickok's grave in 1903.

Despite Hickok’s death Jane stayed around Deadwood.

In 1877 riding post to Crook City, Jane performed her most famous confirmed act of daring to.  She encountered the Overland Mail coach from Cheyenne under attack by a band of hostiles as it was coming into a relay station to change horses.  The driver, John Slaughter—a semi-famous character in his own right—was dead.  Calamity stopped the runaway team, jumped into the driver’s seat, and sped away avoiding a second ambush at the station.  She saved the lives of the six passengers and brought the stage safely into Deadwood.

Despite her increasingly obnoxious, alcohol-fueled behavior around town, Jane won a place in the city’s heart and history in 1878 when she was the only person who volunteered to care for eight men quarantined with smallpox in a small cabin outside of town.  Although three of her charges died, the others recovered, and Jane treated other victims until the epidemic played itself out.

Shortly after the smallpox outbreak, Jane returned to working as a teamster, this time using oxen instead of mules, for the Army, accompanying the 7th Cavalry to Bear Butte Creek where they established Ft. Meade and the town of Sturgis.  The next year she joined the gold rush to Rapid City where she evidently panned the streams and tried to establish a claim.

By 1881 Jane had drifted into Montana where she tried her hand at ranching near Miles City on the Yellowstone River and also ran a “wayside inn for weary travelers.”  It must not have been successful. In 1883 she headed to California where she spent the next two years in Ogden and San Francisco.

In 1885 she was in El Paso, Texas where she met and may have married Clinton Burk.  Although the couple moved together to Boulder, Colorado where they operated a hotel, some scholars don’t believe that they became legally married until the 1890’s.  In 1887 Jane gave birth to daughter Jean, who she gave up to foster parents recognizing that she could not care for the child.

What happened to the baby is unknown, although a woman named Jane McCormick claimed to be Calamity’s daughter born earlier by Hickok.  Jane claimed to be in possession of letters Calamity written but unsent to her daughter which were found among her possessions at the time of her death.  Since Jane was known to be illiterate, these letters have been called into question.  But they have entered the lore.  A composer even set them to a cycle of art songs and they were the basis of the TV movie starring Jane Alexander.

The couple remained in Boulder through 1893.  Meanwhile Calamity’s name had been used without her permission in dime novels including the popular Deadwood Dick series dating back to 1877.  The exploits in them were entirely imaginary, but they fueled public interest.  Reporters sometime sought Jane out at the Boulder hotel where she was interviewed and happily posed in male garb heavily armed on and off horseback.

                       

                                    Calamity later in life as a hotel keeper or as Dora DuFran's cook and dishwasher.

Probably due to Jane’s drinking, her marriage deteriorated.  She became a vagabond sometimes with and sometimes without her husband roaming through Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and Oregon.  In 1895 she returned to Deadwood, where she claimed her old friends welcomed her with open arms.  Certainly, Dora DuFran did, although after 17 years Jane was no longer fit to be one of her girls.  She was, however, an attraction for the eastern tourists who were already showing up looking for the “authentic West.”  If they would stand her for a drink, Calamity was free to accommodate their interest in yarns real and fanciful.

Old associates like Bill Cody had already turned to show business to exploit their celebrity.  Even her beloved Hickok allowed himself to be “put on display” before he died.  Jane accepted an offer by the Palace Museum in Minneapolis in 1897.  But after a few months her drinking and sometime bizarre behavior cost her job.  She tried exhibiting herself on the vaudeville circuit, but her act, telling stories, failed to win many bookings due to her drinking.  She was frequently in trouble.  Cody tried briefly to employ her in his show but could not keep her on.

In 1901 she was appearing at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York where Cody’s Wild West Show was also an attraction.  She was arrested for fighting and disorderly conduct.  Cody bailed her out and paid her fare back to Deadwood.  He later said, “I expect she was no more tired of Buffalo than the Buffalo police were of her, for her sorrows seemed to need a good deal of drowning.”

New markers replaced the original headstones for Calamity and Hickok at Deadwood's Mt. Moriah Cemetery. They remain a tourist attraction but have been eclipsed to some degree by the slot machines that have taken over much of the city's historic downtown strip.

It was pretty much her last hurrah.  Two years later she was dead.  She was taken off a train from Belle Fouche passed out in a drunken stupor and died of a hemorrhage two days later without regaining consciousness.  Her remains were shipped to Deadwood where in the ground next to Hickok she made a more dependable and less troublesome tourist attraction. 

Was Tom Horn a Cowboy Assassin or a Tragic Hero?

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 riata.  

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 hanged 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.  Years later in the classic film Shane, Alan Ladd played 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 the small ranchers and homesteaders suspected of throwing the occasional long lasso over the necks of cattle 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, it all slipped away. 

Mostly cowboys and gunmen from Texas, these men hired by the powerful Wyoming Stock Growers Association were rounded up to stand trial for crimes during the notorious Johnson County Range War.  They all slipped away before they could be brought to trial.

The plutocrats of the Stock Growers Association and the state government in the hands of their handpicked officials 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 toddling around town in newfangled and expensive automobiles.  But despite the appearance of modernity, they 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 the middle of a pack of twelve children.  Not much is known about his childhood other than it was probably pretty typical for its time and place. 

By age 16, like many younger sons with a taste for 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 enlisted as a civilian Cavalry scout under Albert Sieber for General George Cook’s campaign against Chiricahua Apache 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. 

Tom Horn in his glory days as an Army Scout hunting for Geronimo.

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 cantiña.  

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 which side he sold his services.  Also known as the Tonto Basin Feud it was a long running conflict between two 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 those who 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 & 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 to.  If the Agency wanted the publicity of nabbing two semi-famous outlaws and bringing them to justice, he was the man for the job.  If 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 avenging justice. 

Charlie Siringo was a famous Range Detective who turned against his former Pinkerton employer in his memoir Two Evils: Anarchism and Pinkertonism.  He claimed William Pinkerton told him that that Tom Horn was guilty of the murder with which he was charged.

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 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.” 

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. 

Horn may not have been carrying a badge as an Official Stock Growers Association Range Detective, but was working under special assignment.

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, he 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 was 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 a small rancher named Kels Nickell who was running sheep on the range. 

                                            14-year-old Willie Nickell was photographed on his father's ranch not long before he was shot and killed.

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 of the shooting 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. 

An artist's conception of the killing.  The shooter may or may not have been Tom Horn and he may or may not have worked alone.

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 eyewitnesses, 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. 

The Winchester rifle in Horn's possession when he was arrested was too small a caliber to have been used in the Nickell murder, but two larger caliber rounds were found in his pocket.

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. 

At the trial the defense tried to show that neighboring rancher Jim Miller with whom the elder Nickell had clashed over his sheep had a motive to kill.  The testimony came from an attractive schoolteacher, Glendolene M. Kimmell who boarded at the Miller ranch and who was romantically linked to Horn.  But that was not necessarily exculpatory for Horn, who would have used Miller as an asset in his investigation of Nickell, and who might have even been encouraged by him to do the shooting. 

Horn visited school teacher Glenolene M. Kimmell on the Miller Ranch before the ambush and she visited him in jail awaiting trial.  Her interviews of him were the basis of Horn's Autobiography published in Denver.  He involvement with Horn has been romanticized in novels and movies.

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 horsehair 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 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 hanged in Cheyenne on November 20, 1903.  He was just over 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 fictional western movie, Fort Utah staring John Ireland in 1967 cast him as a hero.  Best known film version was 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 his guilt. 

                                                        Steve McQueen's Tom Horn was a man whose time had passed.

Western historians are divided on the case.  A good many believe that despite the scant evidence, Horn was probably guilty.  Others believe that he accidently killed the boy intending to kill the father and many 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.