George Scarborough - Lawman/Outlaw

By Paisley Kirkpatrick

Recently I became aware of a dear friend's family connection to George Scarborough, one of the more modest frontier gunmen who helped tame the New Mexico and Arizona Territories. George was born in Louisiana October 2, 1859. He had quite a bit of gunplay and excitement in his limited career as a lawman. He had a considerable reputation among his peers and the outlaws he tracked throughout the southwestern wilderness.

The son of a Texas homesteader and parson, George knew firsthand the unsettled conditions of the southern frontier after the Civil War ended. His family moved to Texas where he worked as a cowboy for a while. After riding the range, he decided he'd rather deal with men than cattle. In 1885, when he was 26 years old, he took his first job as sheriff of Anson, Texas, then moved onto to work as deputy US Marshal in untamed El Paso, and finally worked as a private detective for the New Mexico Cattlemen's Association in the 1890's. At the time, El Paso was a rough town isolated from any nearby American towns. It was filled with gambling halls, bordellos, and unsavory characters, including John Wesley Hardin and John Selman.

Scarborough became well known for the unusual tactics he used while tracking a wanted outlaw. Often, he would disguise himself as an equal to those he pursued. He found this tactic extremely effective. He became hated and feared among lawbreakers. There have been many accusations that he was actively and ambitiously involved with outlaw gangs that he later betrayed, but no one could ever conclusively proved he was involved in unlawful actions.

In 1895 John Wesley Hardin claimed that he paid Scarborough and Jeff Milton, the El Paso Chief of Police, to kill outlaw and cattle rustler, Martin McRose. Milton and Scarborough were arrested but Hardin later withdrew his comments and the men were released. Later that year, gunslinger and latter-day lawman John Selman shot John Wesley Hardin in the back of the head while the man stood at the Acme Saloon Bar. On April 6, 1896, John Selman was murdered by Scarborough. George was put on trial for Selman's murder, but was acquitted.

Public opinion after his trial forced him to leave for the New Mexico Territory. He spent the rest of his days hunting down cattle rustlers and train robbers throughout the territory.

George had little appreciation for the overstated news reports of his exploits. In those days, the most effective lawmen had a dark side, but few were foolish enough to draw attention to themselves. In fear of revealing too much about his methods, George refused interviews by journalists. On April 5, 1900, Scarborough was involved in a shoot-out with George Stevenson and James Brooks. He was shot in the leg and taken back to Deming, where his leg was amputated. He died the following day.

After his death, the mysteries and legends surrounding George Scarborough were largely forgotten.

Pearl Hart – American Desperado

By Anna Kathryn Lanier

What should have been a life of modesty and respect, instead turned into a life of crime and legend.  Pearl Taylor,  the daughter of middle-class parents in Ontario, Canada, met and fell in love at the age of seventeen with a Nar ‘do well gambler and drinker, Fred Hart and eloped.

Five years later, in 1893, the couple made their way to the Colombian Exposition in Chicago where Fred found a job as a sideshow barker.  Pearl worked a number of odd jobs and escaped her dreary life by spending the afternoons watching Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show and dreaming of the romantic West.

Finally tiring of her hard-drinking, abusive husband, Pearl packed up and headed West for the start of a new life. Unfortunately, it was a short-lived dream when she discovered she was pregnant. She returned to Canada and her family for the support they could give her.  After giving birth to a son, Pearl left the baby in her mother’s care and moved to Arizona.  She worked odd jobs to support herself in a less than glamorous and heroic West than she had envisioned. 

Fred followed her trail and when he caught up with her, he begged forgiveness and promised changes.  For a while, the couple lived a happier domestic life, however, after the arrival of a daughter Fred abandoned his family, allegedly to join Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.

Pearl once again returned to her parents for support.  She didn’t stay long and soon returned to Arizona, leaving both her children behind.  Once back in the West, she worked odd jobs and as a cook in the various mining towns.  In 1899, she took up with a miner by the name of Joe Boot. After she received word that her mother was ill and needed money for medical care, she and Joe devised several schemes to raise the money.  When none of them proved lucrative enough, they decided to rob the Globe-to-Florence stagecoach.

With her hair cut and wearing Joe’s clothing, Pearl helped rob the three passengers of over $400 and a gun.  Feeling sorry for the passengers, Pearl is said to have returned a dollar to each for food.  The bandits high-tailed it into the unfamiliar desert foothills, where they promptly got lost.  After wandering around aimlessly for several days, they awoke one morning to find themselves surrounded by a sheriff and his posse.

While being held for trial, the “Queen Bandit” milked her fame for all its worth.  Allowed access to visitors and reports, she posed for pictures and signed autographs. In a surprise verdict and despite pleading guilty, the jury acquitted her, perhaps finding sympathy in her claim that she was trying to raise money for her dear, sick mother.  The judge, however, was furious.  He had Pearl tried again for “unlawfully carrying a gun,” the gun being the one stolen in the robbery.  This time, she was found guilty and sentenced to five years in the Yuma Territorial Prison.

Her fame grew as she served her time.  Reporters visited her often, posing her for pictures with unloaded guns.  By the time she was paroled 18 months into her sentence, she was a legend.  She also claimed she was pregnant and may have been paroled early to avoid a scandal, as she would have conceived while in custody.  The claim seems to have been a ruse, though. There’s no record of a third child being born.

The Two Pearl Harts:

 

After her release from prison, Pearl moved to Kansas City and starred in a theater production (written by her sister) of her life.  The play was short-lived though and Pearl’s fame faded.

In 1924, she’s alleged to have visited the courthouse where she was tried. Upon leaving, she told the attendant, “Nothing’s changed.” He asked who she was and, rather dramatically she replied, “Pearl Hart, the lady bandit.”

What happened to Pearl after that is unclear.  There is a claim she died in 1925 in Kansas City, another she lived in California until 1952.  The most knocked about story, however, is that she married an Arizona rancher, Calvin Bywater, and lived until the mid-1950’s as a hard-working, cigar-smoking, blue-streak-cussing law abiding citizen.  Whatever happened to Pearl in her later years, her younger ones were certainly bigger than life and she appears to be the only woman tried for robbing a stagecoach.

References:

Ladies First: History’s greatest female trailblazers, winners and mavericks by Lynn Santa Lucia

http://www.legendsofamerica.com/we-pearlhart.html

http://ladybelleoutlaw.homestead.com/WomenOfTheWest.html

 

http://www.annalsofcrime.com/04-03.htm

This lecture first appeared on Faith V. Smith’s blog on May 18, 2011. http://faithvsmith.blogspot.com/2011/05/make-welcome-anna-kathryn-lanier.html

 

Learn more about Pioneering Women in my online workshop, November 4-29, 2013.  Learn more about it HERE.

 

Anna Kathryn Lanier
Romance Author, A GIFT BEYOND ALL MEASURE

http://aklanier.com/

'The Most Dreaded Man North of the Rio Grande'

William Prescott "Wild Bill" Longley

The years following the American Civil War were particularly difficult for Texas. The state fought reunification for five long years, insisting it had the right to become an independent republic once again. While the U.S. Army attempted to enforce martial law and the feds dragged the battered would-be empire before the Supreme Court, outlaws, freedmen, and carpetbaggers flooded the wild and wooly, wide-open spaces.

The era produced some hard men. None were harder than Wild Bill Longley.

The sixth of ten children, William Prescott Longley was born October 6, 1851, on a farm along Mill Creek in Austin County, Texas. His father had fought with Sam Houston at San Jacinto. Little is known about Wild Bill’s youth until December 1868, when, at the age of seventeen, he killed his first man — an unarmed former slave he claimed was cursing his father.

The episode set Longley on a path he would follow for the rest of his life. After the black man’s murder, Longley and a cousin lit out for southern Texas. They spent 1869 robbing settlers, stealing horses, and killing freed slaves and Mexicans — men and women. A virulent racist with a hair-trigger temper and a fast gun hand, Longley quickly gained a reputation for picking fights with any whites he suspected of harboring Yankee sympathies or carpetbagging. In early 1870, the Union occupation force in Texas placed a $1,000 price on the cousins’ heads. Longley was not yet nineteen.

Not that he saw the bounty as a cause for concern. Standing a little over six feet tall with a lean, lithe build and a gaze described as fierce and penetrating, Longley “carried himself like a prince” and had “a set of teeth like pearls.” One newspaper writer called him “one of the handsomest men I have ever met” and “the model of the roving desperado of Texas.” The same writer called Longley “the most dreaded man north of the Rio Grande”: What his looks couldn’t get him, the brace of fourteen-inch, six-shot Dance .44 revolvers he carried could.

As news of the federal bounty spread, Longley and his cousin separated, and Longley took up with a cattle drive headed for Kansas. By May 1870 he was in Cheyenne, Wyoming; by June, he was in South Dakota, where for unknown reasons he enlisted in the army. Within two weeks he deserted. Capture, court-martial, and prison time followed, but evidently none of that make a big impression. After his release from the stockade, Longley was sent back to his unit. In May 1872, he deserted again and lit a shuck for Texas, gambling, scraping — and killing — along the way. Folks as far east as Missouri and Arkansas learned not to get in his way, not to disagree with him, and for heaven’s sake not to insult Texas. Longley was rumored to have shot white men over card games, Indians for target practice, and black folks just for fun.

By the time he killed another freedman in Bastrop County, Texas, in 1873, Longley was well beyond notorious. The murder jogged a local lawman’s memory about the federal bounty still outstanding from 1870. The sheriff arrested Longley, but when the army wasn’t quick to tender a reward, he let the surly gunman go.

Longley visited his family, worked a few odd jobs, and fended off several reckless sorts who hoped to make a name by besting a gunman known as one of the deadliest quick-draw artists in the west. In March 1875, he ambushed and killed a boyhood friend, Wilson Anderson, whom Longley’s family blamed for a relative’s death. That same year, Longley shot to death a hunting buddy with whom he’d had a fistfight. A few months later, in January 1876, he killed an outlaw when a quarrel-turned-ambush became a gunfight.

On the run, using at least eight different names to avoid the multiple rewards for his capture plastered all over East Texas, Longley hid out as a sharecropper on a preacher’s cotton farm, only to fall for a woman on whom his landlord’s nephew had staked a prior claim. Longley killed the nephew, then took off across the Sabine River into De Soto Parish, Louisiana. Reportedly turned in by someone he trusted, the law caught up with him on June 6, 1877, while he was hoeing a Louisiana cotton field, unarmed.

Though historians dispute the figures, Longley confessed to killing 32 men, six to ten of them white and one a Methodist minister. Later, he retracted that account and claimed eight kills. A court in Giddings, Texas, convicted him of only one murder, Anderson’s, and sentenced him to hang. While awaiting execution, “the worst man in Texas” wrote his memoirs, embraced Catholicism, and filed a wagonload of appeals. All of them were denied.

Illustration from National Police Gazette, Oct. 26, 1878

Facing an ignominious end, Longley seems to have had a change of heart. On the day of his execution, October 11, 1878, the 27-year-old sang hymns and prayed in his cell before mounting the gallows “with a smile on his face and a lighted cigar in his mouth.” After the noose was placed around his neck, the man the Decatur [Illinois] Daily Review described as “the most atrocious criminal in the country” held up a hand and addressed the crowd.

“I see a good many enemies around me and mighty few friends,” Longley said. “I hope to God you will forgive me. I will you. I hate to die, of course; any man hates to die. But I have earned this by taking the lives of men who loved life as well as I do.

“If I have any friends here, I hope they will do nothing to avenge my death. If they want to help me, let them pray for me. I deserve this fate. It is a debt I owe for my wild, reckless life. When it is paid, it will be all over with. May God forgive me.”


A journalist in real life, Kathleen Rice Adams also is an editor and ghostwriter of non-fiction books. A rabble-rousing Texan to the bone, she much prefers romancing fictional western antiheros one protagonist at a time.

SAM BASS, FAMOUS TEXAS OUTLAW AND FAMILY HISTORY

By Guest author, Carra Copelin

Sam Bass

Through the genealogy research of our family history, I continually search for the validity of stories passed from one generation to the next. So far I'm 0 for 0. A few of these are:
1.  A great grandmother was Cherokee or part Cherokee. No.
2.  A great-great grandfather came to Tennessee from Germany, then to Texas. No, it appears he was possibly an Englishman from Illinois
3.  My Pike ancestors were related to Zebulon Pike, explorer and discoverer of Pike's Peak. No.
4.  We are related by marriage to Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy. You guessed it, No.
 Now, in all fairness, it is possible I haven't gone down the right trail or all evidence for the right trail no longer exists. Maybe there's a left turn out there I will find someday.

The biggest story we haven't proven yet is that we are related to Sam Bass, the outlaw. My great-grandmother, on my father's side, was Anna Bass Carr, born 1874 in Clifton, Bosque County, Texas. She told the story of how, when she was a little girl, a man came to their home late one night. Her mother, Sarah Hardison Bass, let him in, gave him food and lodging. The next morning, when she awoke, the man was gone. Granny said, her mother told her that man was her cousin, Sam Bass.

Another story involving, Sam Bass, happened on my mother's side of the family. This tale says the outlaw was headed south from Denton by way of the Garland - Mesquite area, North of Dallas. Sam stopped at the McCommas farm, the home of mother's great-great uncle. Sam bought fresh horses and left his own for the farmer. Once again, there is no proof, but I want to believe.

Young Sam Bass

Sam was born on July 21, 1851on a farm in Mitchell, Indiana. He was orphaned at the age of ten. He and his brother and sisters lived with an abusive uncle and his nine children for the next five years. In 1869, Sam lived on his own in Mississippi at Charles' Mill where he learned how to handle a pistol and sharpened his card playing skills. In 1871, he moved to Denton in North Texas.

He went to work for Sheriff W.F. (Dad) Eagan. Sheriff Eagan employed Sam as a farmhand where he curried horses, milked the cows, and cut firewood, but more importantly, young Sam spent some time as a teamster. It was at this position that he became acquainted with the country and learned all the trails, back roads and thickets he would later use to elude the Texas Rangers.

Sam Bass Gang, Jim Miller on left back

Bass formed a gang and robbed the Union Pacific gold train from San Francisco. He and his men intercepted the train on September 18, 1877 at Big Spring, Nebraska, looting $60,000. To this day it is the largest single robbery of the Union Pacific. Sam and his gang staged a string of robberies after this, never netting over $500 at any one time. In 1878, the gang held up two stagecoaches and four trains within twenty-five miles of Dallas and became the object of a manhunt by Pinkerton agents and a special company of Texas Rangers headed by Captain Junius Peak.

The Bass gang eluded the Rangers until one member of his gang, Jim Murphy, turned informant. Mr. Murphy's father, who was very ill at the time, was taken into custody and held for questioning. He was not allowed to see a doctor, and his condition rapidly worsened. Law officers then sent a message to Murphy informing him that they had his father in custody, and they would continue to withhold medical treatment. Murphy, knowing how sick his father was, agreed to the meeting, which resulted in him reluctantly agreeing to become an informant. That is the tactic that had to be employed to catch the wiley Sam Bass. Major John B. Jones, Texas Ranger, was informed of Bass's movements, and set up an ambush at Round Rock, Texas, where Bass planned to rob the Williamson County Bank.

On July 19, 1878, Bass and his gang were scouting the area before the robbery. When they bought some tobacco at a store, they were noticed by Deputy Sheriff A. W. Grimes. When Grimes approached the men to request that they surrender their side arms, he was shot and killed. As Bass attempted to flee, he was shot by Ranger George Herold and then by Texas Ranger Sergeant Richard Ware. Near Ware, were Soapy Smith and his cousin Edwin who witnessed Ware's shot. Soapy exclaimed, "I think you got him." Bass was found lying in a pasture by a group of railroad workers, who summoned the authorities. He was taken into custody and died the next day on his 27th birthday.

Bass was buried in Round Rock, some fifteen miles north of Austin, Texas's state capitol. Today, his grave is marked with a replacement headstone, the original having suffered at the hands of souvenir collectors over the years. What remains of the original stone is on display at the Round Rock Public Library.

After Sam died his legend grew, helped along by a song.♫ "The Ballad of Sam Bass" ♫, written by John Denton of Gainesville, Texas, was sung by many cowhands in an attempt to sooth the herd on stormy nights. Sam's fame spread to Great Britain in the late 1800s, culminating in a wax statue of him in Madam Tussaud's Waxworks in London (Ibid.).

Today, Sam Bass is not as well-known as he was in the past. However, Round Rock maintains its historical legacy as evidenced by the street markers identifying the events in the celebrated shootout.

My family's connection to Sam, while not yet proven, may still be true. I have traced our Bass ancestors back to Gibson County, Indiana. I'm ever hopeful that one day a distant relative will stand up and say 'Howdy', so to speak, and we'll have our documentation.

Carra Copelin, Author

Carra was born in Dallas, Texas and raised a few miles away in Arlington just a stone's throw from where the Dallas Cowboys now call home. Unlike other authors, she didn't write from childhood or read long into the night, but discovered romance novels as an adult. In addition to relieving stress, she found there were many people residing in her head, all looking for a way onto the printed page, so she decided to give writing a try. From that day she was hooked, and, even though life took over for a while, Carra is busy bringing her characters to life. Now retired from the Medical Technology field, Carra writes contemporary and historical romance and is collaborating on a time travel.

Carra can currently be found:
http://carra-copelin.blogspot.com
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Carra-Copelin-Texas-Skies-Author/233861816666958
https://twitter.com/#!/CarraCopelin