U.S. Marshals Service and Nineteenth Century Violence

Troy D. Smith

Being a peace officer is, well, not always peaceful. It is a dangerous profession. Being in the federal marshals service has its own set of attendant dangers, as one of our regular contributors knows from experience. 

That particular profession was especially dangerous, though, in the late 19^th century.

You can go to the Officers Down Memorial Page and read through a list, with some details attached, of every member of the U.S. Marshals Service to die in the line of duty since it was established in 1789. The list includes both Deputy U.S. Marshals and deputized posse members. The first to fall was Marshal Robert Forsyth, killed in Georgia in 1794 –he was shot through a door while attempting to serve papers. The most recent name on the list (as of this writing) is that of Deputy Commander Patrick Thomas Carothers, a 26-year veteran –he, too, was shot in Georgia while attempting to enter a home to serve a warrant. In all, the list contains 280 names (again, so far).

190 of those men died between 1870 and 1910. That is more than two-thirds.

It will come as no surprise to many of our readers and contributors that one-half of those 1870-1910 deaths, 95 to be specific, occurred in the area known initially as Indian Territory, later divided into Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory, and by the end of that era the state of Oklahoma. To do a little more math, that means that ONE-THIRD of all members of the Marshals Service to die in the line of duty did so in Oklahoma in the space of a few decades.

That’s because Oklahoma was, as they say, wide open. Or as a saying from the time put it, “There is no Sunday west of St. Louis, and no God west of Fort Smith.”

This was due to a very unique set of circumstances surrounding Oklahoma. The eastern half was the home (not by choice, for many of them) of the “Five Civilized Tribes”: Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles, who had been removed to Oklahoma in the 1830s (and 1840s, for the resisting Seminoles), although a minority had acquiesced and come peacefully of their own accord before the Trail of Tears. The western half of Oklahoma was, at that time, home to the so-called “wild” tribes- Comanches, Kiowas, and etc.

The Five Tribes had written laws and their own police forces, called light horse, to enforce them (depending on the tribe, individual districts also had sheriffs). This was all well and good when dealing with Indian criminals and Indian victims, but a jurisdictional morass arose when non-Indians were involved. You see, the Indians had no jurisdiction over crimes that involved American citizens (non-Indians, in other words). At the same time, the Supreme Court had long since determined that, constitutionally, state and local governments had no jurisdiction over Indian country. In such cases (and this is still true), only the federal government has authority. At that time, this meant the U.S. Marshals Service, which eventually operated out of the court in Fort Smith, Arkansas (which was right on the border of Indian Territory). For many years, that court was presided over by Judge Isaac Parker, known widely as “The Hanging Judge.”

What this meant, in the 1870s and 1880s, was this: if you were an outlaw operating in Texas, Arkansas, or Missouri, you could “light out for the Nations” and have a very good chance of getting away and being able to continue your wayward career. The local Indian authorities could not touch you, and state or county lawmen could not follow you. The only people who could come after you were members of the U.S. Marshals Service. (Sometimes this situation was altered by Indian peace officers, such as the Cherokee Sam Sixkiller, also being deputized as Deputy U.S. Marshals. There were also quite a few black marshals, Bass Reeves being the most famous.)

Therefore, there were a lot of outlaws in the Nations, with a finite number of federal marshals to track them down. It’s no surprise, then, that so many marshals were killed in the attempt to do so. Look through that 280 name list, and you might be surprised how many lawmen were killed in Oklahoma after catching their man –by sleeping on the return trip to Fort Smith, and being killed with axes or big sticks or whatever the prisoners who managed to work their way loose were able to get their hands on.

The situation got worse in the 1890s, after the Dawes Act had allowed for the allotment of most tribes’ land and the opening of parts of Oklahoma for settlement. The Five Tribes were excluded from this at first, since they were technically already “civilized”, although an addition to the law in 1898 brought them under allotment as well. Starting at the end of the 1880s and growing exponentially by the year, the Five Tribes were surrounded by more and more settlers, making the jurisdictional issue ever more pronounced as more non-Indians in the region magnified the problem. These were the days of the Doolins and the Daltons, of Cherokee Bill, of the Starrs, of the famed “Three Guardsmen” (Chris Madsen, Heck Thomas, and Bill Tilghman) leading federal posses after outlaws, and of the efforts to capture Ned Christie (and other, lesser-known Cherokees such as Bill Pigeon).

So that explains the high mortality rate of officers in Oklahoma. But what about the rest of the country during that same period? Going back to that concept of mathematics, fully one-third of federal marshals ever killed in the line of duty fell from 1870-1910… outside of Oklahoma. So it was still a pretty violent time everywhere else, as well.

Not all of them were murdered. Thomas Foley was killed in Virginia in 1870 when a courtroom balcony collapsed and killed him and 61 other people. Clement McCausland died in Dakota Territory in 1872 while pursuing a fugitive, when he got lost in a blizzard. James Arnold died in 1891 while transporting a prisoner to a prison on an island off the coast of Washington (the state) –a sudden squall capsized their sailboat and he drowned.

Almost all, however, were murdered. As one would expect, a large number of those deaths occurred in the American West (not counting Oklahoma). We should probably count the two marshals killed in Alaska in separate incidents during the Klondike gold rush among those. Some names on the list who died in the West might jump out at the western reader: Bob Olinger, for example, killed in Lincoln County, NM, by Billy the Kid during a jailbreak.

Here’s the interesting part, though. Taking the 95 deaths in Oklahoma out of the mix, there were 30 marshals killed in the line of duty in the American West. There was a grand total of ONE killed in the North –stabbed while trying to arrest a deserter from a Russian ship in New Jersey.

And there were 56 killed in the South.

Most of these men died in Tennessee, Kentucky, northern Georgia, and North Carolina. And most of them were killed by moonshiners, either while serving warrants, transporting prisoners, or in ambush. (Two were killed by the Ku Klux Klan during the federal government's efforts to suppress that terrorist group in the early 1870s, one in Tennessee and one in Mississippi.)

Actually, several marshals who died in Oklahoma were killed while raiding stills or trying to arrest bootleggers (remember Rooster Cogburn’s testimony in True Grit?) The circumstances were slightly different, though. All sales of alcohol were forbidden in Indian Territory; in the South, it was not the sale or private distilling of alcohol that was the problem, it was the fact that no taxes were being collected on it.

Farmers making their own liquor was a longstanding tradition- in fact, at one time it had been more a general rural tradition than a specifically Southern Appalachian one. Turning your grain into alcohol made it easier to store and transport, and brought more money. The first federal tax on a specific item was on whiskey, which led to the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania in the 1790s. That tradition had remained strong in the Mountain South.

After the end of the Civil War, presidents Grant and Hayes stressed the enforcement of tax laws on whiskey as a way to pay down the war debt. This led to what was known as the Moonshine Wars of the 1870s (and later, as well). Federal agents started sweeping through the mountains, forcing licensed still owners to pay taxes and shutting down unlicensed ones. Most of the Mountain South had been pro-Union during the war, but during and after Reconstruction there was a growth of ex-Confederate sensibility in the region, and in this case it was exacerbated by federal “outsiders” trying to control what had become a mountain tradition.

Which led to the surprising fact that –if you take Oklahoma, a unique case, out of the equation –if you were in the federal marshals service in the late 19^th/early 20^th century, you were statistically almost twice as likely to be shot by Southern moonshiners as by Western outlaws (in reality, of course, this would depend on where you were serving).

Oklahoma and the Mountain South had something else in common besides violence (and Cherokees). I’m speaking of public reaction to that violence.

As I mentioned earlier, at first the Five Civilized Tribes were exempt from allotment. To clarify, allotment, made government policy by the Dawes Act of 1887, meant that control over Native lands would be taken away from tribal governments and instead each Indian family would be given (allotted) a small farm. For most tribes, this resulted in a lot of land being left over, previously under control of the tribe. This “leftover” public land, controlled by the federal government, was opened to settlement.

As more settlers poured into Oklahoma, many of them eyed the prime lands still controlled by the Five Tribes. Those settlers, and the governments of neighboring states, immediately started proclaiming how unfair it was that all this land was under the control of “wild, uncivilized savages.” But wait, one might say, the Five Tribes were exempt from the new law because they were “civilized.” Many of them operated modern businesses and spoke perfect English. Well, many Americans started saying, if they’re so doggone civilized…. Why is it so wild there in the Nations? Why is there so much violence and lawlessness? And it was impossible to argue that there was no violence, because there definitely was. The true reason for it, of course, was the complicated legal situation in which the Five Tribes had been placed by the federal government, but no one (aside from the Indians) was saying that. Rather, the violence was being used as a justification for the government to come in and take over… and to redistribute the Indians’ resources to white Americans.

Meanwhile, in the Mountain South, northern investors and their southern partners started expanding industry after the Civil War. New railroads were built –the antebellum Southern railroad system had existed primarily to link cotton plantations to harbor cities so as to ship their product overseas –and that led to new businesses. In particular, lumber and coal mining started to boom post-Civil War. Before the war, most of the coal mining had taken place in northern Appalachia, in western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio. Once new railroads extended into the southern mountains, coal mining became a viable operation.

However, a lot of southern mountain folk were hesitant –or downright unwilling –to sell or lease their land, or even the mineral and timber rights to it, to these new businesses. They were, in effect, “holding up progress” due to a strong affinity for their own land and traditions.

At the end of Reconstruction (which was officially over after the inauguration of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877) there was a clarion call among progressives in the former Confederate states for a “New South” –one that was open to industry and business (other than just cotton), and was modernized. Southern mountaineers –who had always been presented as the ultimate frontier heroes (Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, even Andrew Jackson if you think about it) –were standing in the way of that, and the economic benefits (for some) that would come with it.

Therefore, just like newspapers in Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Missouri were doing with the Five Tribes, papers started focusing heavily on the violence of the Moonshine Wars as evidence that Southern mountain folk were backward, wild, and uncivilized. They especially latched onto the Hatfield and McCoy feud on the Kentucky-West Virginia border, with papers all around the country taking it up. 

In the 1880s, therefore, the national image of southern mountain folk changed from that of rugged, self-sufficient frontier heroes to what we now call the “hillbilly stereotype” –violent, ignorant, wild, savage, lazy, dishonest, and incompetent. That is a far cry from Davy Crockett.

“Hillbilly” became shorthand for a group of people that it was okay for everyone else to make fun of and look down on (which is still the case –watch reality TV at any random time.) But more to the point –just like those “wild” Cherokees –hillbillies were both violent and backward, mentally incapable of knowing what was in their own best interests, and of controlling their own resources. So, just like in Indian Territory, it was okay for government and private business interests to come in and make those decisions (especially concerning resources) for them. By the 1920s and 1930s, by the way, Appalachian violence and the need to suppress it had expanded to include striking coalminers (watch the movie Matewan.)

Ned Christie, the “Cherokee outlaw”, and moonshiners in Southern Appalachia were both resisting what they considered to be a foreign government, and the act of their resistance reinforced the idea that they needed to be more firmly controlled (I think it could be strongly argued that the Cherokees had a lot more justification than moonshiners who didn’t want to pay taxes –my point is not the justification, but the mindset.) In both cases, this led to control of their natural resources passing out of their own hands.

The federal marshals, of course, were just doing their jobs… a hard and thankless job, made more dangerous by the circumstances of their times.

(by the way, to have the last portion of this piece essentially set to music, listen to the song above: "You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive." The song was played in each season finale of Justified, a TV series about a former coal-miner turned Deputy U.S. Marshal in Appalachian Kentucky.)

The Dead Line

 by Phil Truman

The Dead Line, as it came to be called, was a railroad, the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas, cutting across the middle of Indian Territory.

Missouri, Kansas, & Texas RR

It ran straight south from Caldwell, Kansas to Fort Reno, I.T., then on down through the Cheyenne and Comanche and Kiowa lands, crossing the Red River into Bowie, Texas. It was not only a line on a map, but a physical demarcation. West of it there was no law, only outlaws. On trails out there, notes would be put up on trees and posts, sort of reverse wanted posters, letting lawmen - usually those Federal marshals up from Texas or over from Arkansas - know they’d be killed if they continued their pursuits west of the Dead Line.

Throughout the 225 year history of the U.S. Marshals Service, over 200 deputies have been killed in the line of duty. Of those, more than 120 lost their lives in the Indian and Oklahoma Territories between 1850 and Oklahoma statehood in 1907.

Relic of the MKT

In the storied annals of the American West, no place comes close to matching the dangers and mortality these Federal officers faced doing their jobs. Their courage, resolve, and dedication to duty were beyond reproach...for the most part. Those who survived became titans in the legends of the West.

The stories in this collection I call West of the Dead Line are fiction, but the encounters these lawmen faced, and The Dead Line, were not.

This first volume - seven are written, about five more are sketched out - involves tales centering around Bass Reeves, an illiterate ex-slave, adopted Creek Indian, scout for the Federal marshals, and eventually a Deputy U.S. Marshal himself, perhaps the best there ever was. In his 32 years as a Federal peace officer in the Indian Territory and young state of Oklahoma Reeves brought in over 3,000 outlaws to the Federal Court in Fort Smith, Arkansas, both dead and alive, one of whom was his own son wanted for murder.

So here are story lines and excepts from the first two stories in Volume I:

#1 - Bringing in Pike Cudgo

After the cold-blooded murder of two lawmen, Deputy Marshal Bass Reeves, along with his colleagues, Deputy Heck Thomas and Posseman Jud Coldstone, pursue a ruthless Seminole “freedman” into the harsh country of the Wichita Mountains. Aided by a band of Cheyenne hunters, Reeves and his allies seek to bring the outlaw Pike Cudgo to justice. 

Deputy Marshal Bynum P. Nelson felt surprise right before he died. He had a fraction of a second to be pissed, but he was mostly surprised. It never occurred to him that Pike Cudgo would walk right up to him, and stick that eight inch blade into the left side of his neck. He knew the Seminole freedman was a mean and dangerous sumbitch, but he’d been caught off-guard by Cudgo’s cordiality. It was his last mistake.

“You Deputy Nelson?” the man asked. He came walking up to him out of the night shadows right there on the main street of Waurika, smiling like they were at a church social, and he was about to introduce himself. “Your man, Maha, said you’s lookin’ for me.”

He started to stick his hand out as if to offer a handshake, but instead slid a bone-handled Boulder knife out of his coat sleeve and stabbed it into Nelson’s neck, right between two vertebrae, severing the lawman’s spinal cord. The surprise came up in Nelson’s brain the second he caught a glint of the raised blade, but that split-second was all he had as the emotion died right along with the rest of him that fatal instant there on the night streets of Waurika, I.T. in 1889. 

Cudgo embraced the slumping body of Nelson while he jerked the knife out of the lawman’s neck, then let the dead weight of him drop to the dirt street. Cudgo wiped the blade on a faded red bandana that hung from his belt, standing there looking around. His cruel black eyes searched for anyone watching; anyone he thought might care about what he’d just done, anyone else he might have to take care of. The expression on his mean black face was a mask of cold-blooded dispassion. Human life had no value to Pike Cudgo, except his own.

#2 - Freed Men

The young slave Bass Reeves is captured by a Yankee spy during the Civil War campaign in Arkansas which ended at the Battle of Pea Ridge. Set free by his captor, Bass wanders into the encampment of the 2nd Cherokee Mounted Rifles of the Southern Army whose leader presses the lost slave to stand and fight with them. Battling shoulder-to-shoulder with the Cherokee warriors during the fierce combat, Bass’s life is forever changed in a way he never before imagined. 

“Where you from, Yank?” Bass asked. 

His captor stared at Reeves squarely before looking into the fire. “Kansas, mostly,” he said. “Rode with General Lane’s Jayhawkers. He didn’t much cotton to secessionists… or slave owners. Called himself an ‘abolitionist.’”

“That why you rode with him? You uh…ab-bol-lishnest?”

The Yankee threw back his head and laughed. He stood and walked out to the edge of the firelight to take his own piss, chuckling to himself as he did so.

When he came back to the fire, he sat again opposite Reeves, stirred the coals with a stick, threw on another piece of wood. “You even know what that means, boy? Abolitionist?"

“Sho’ I does,” Bass answered, a little indignant. “It mean freein’ slaves.”

“Seems to me the only freed men is the dead ones,” his captor said. He paused to stir the fire some more, looked at Bass. “I’ve personally freed a few myself,” he said with a grin and a wink.

“Naw, I rode with Lane because he offered me the job,” he continued. “Pay wasn’t much, but it kept me out of jail. I needed that more than money at the time.

Battle of Pea Ridge

“Still, sayin’ it’s legal to own a man don’t seem right to me. Sure as hell don’t believe I’d put up with anyone claimin’ they owned me.”

Silence fell between the pair again. The haunting sound of a harmonica drifted in with the cold night air. Men’s voices echoed through the black forest; voices in calm conversation and some laughter, distant but clear like coming across a still river at night.

”Whas yo name, then?” Bass asked. Another long pause followed before the Yankee answered.

“I got several names. Go by Haycock in this here army, William Haycock. Back in Kansas some folks called me ‘Wild Bill.’ Called me that because of the shape of my nose, made fun of how it swoops out sorta like a duck’s bill. I didn’t much like it at first, made a few callin’ me that pay. But now I believe I like it…yes sir, believe I do. You can call me Wild Bill.”

Bass nodded, and grinned back at the man. “Wild Bill,” he repeated.

“You realize I’m only telling you this ’cause you’ll be dead before sundown tomorrow.”

Bass looked cold-eyed at Haycock. “You gone kill me, Wild Bill?” he asked.

Haycock laughed again. “Naw, I ain’t gonna kill you, Bass. I’m gonna let you go. But boys see a nigger runnin’ free through these here woods, I figure one side or t’other’s bound to shoot your ass. Ain’t that what we’re fightin’ for? To set your likes free?” He cocked an eyebrow and grinned at his captive.

Bass stared back at Haycock. After a bit, he said to him, “You lets me go, Wild Bill, how you know I ain’t finds myself a gun an’ frees yo’ ass?” 

The Yankee continued to grin back at Bass. After a few seconds Haycock began to sputter through his teeth, then his chest bucked. His eyes squinted as snorts of laughter welled up from his gut and burst out his mouth.

You can get your copy of the West of the Dead Line stories  by clicking on the titles above. Phil has also authored three other novels: the award-winning historical western novel,  Red Lands Outlaw, the Ballad of Henry Starr;  a sports inspirational about small town schoolboy football entitled GAME, an American Novel; and Treasure Kills (formerly Legends of Tsalagee), a mystery/adventure in a small town. 
 

 

 

THE TIES THAT BIND: Buddy Movies, Buddy Books and Just Plain Buddies--- By Marc Cameron

Allowing for obvious dissimilarities, if my bride and I were to play in a remake of Lethal Weapon, she’d be the Danny Glover character and I’d be Mel Gibson.  She’s the rational, sane one and I’m…well…not.

The sort of devotion that made Woodrow Call carry Augustus McCrae’s body all the way back to Texas, doesn’t spring up out of nowhere—and the hardship and adventure that builds that kind of relationship makes for a great story.

A quick review of  my novels will tell you I love to write about the bond of strong friendship—and I’m blessed to have incredible friends on whom to base the stories.  Over the years, I have been fortunate to work with some of the finest men and women on the planet, often under austere and dangerous conditions.

At US Marshals HQ, just before I retired

The U.S. Marshals training academy is a tough endeavor. There’s a certain amount of constitutional law, intensive interview training, and other practical exercises designed to emulate the real world of federal law enforcement.  But the physical stuff is what weeds people out. There’s a heck of a lot of running, fighting, shooting, weight lifting… more fighting, and grass-drills that are affectionately known as “Marshals’ Beach”—where the instructors sit in deck chairs with zinc oxide on their noses while Basic Deputies do hours of calisthenics. When my class went through a couple of decades ago, we had a defensive tactics instructor named Bob Natzke. The man was a martial arts legend and seemed to enjoy pitting us against one another in full-contact fights. Incredibly fit, he expected all of us to be as well, leading us through hours of exercise he liked to call “push and puke.” One morning, while the class endured seven slooooooow pushups, stretched over an hour and a half (that’s right, I said “7”), Mr. Natske scuttled back and forth between us, himself in pushup position, screaming in our faces as we trembled in various stages of up and down, about how we were all bound to be stabbed to death on the street if we didn’t get our crap together. I once saw a deputy drop her tray of food in the cafeteria when someone jokingly said, “Here comes Mr. Natske.” He retired soon after I graduated. But the cadre of deputy marshals in our class shares a common bond because of the blood and sweat that guy got out of us. He made us better and safer deputies. We love him for it and wouldn’t trade the nightmare for anything.

My friend, Gladys on right, stuffing the guy in a patrol car

People who’ve served in the military know even better than I, but there is a bond between those who work together under hardship and danger. I’ve written a couple of essays about scrapping. The men and women who were involved with me in making those arrests and fighting the worst of those bad guys will always be my brothers and sisters.  I still keep in touch with one of my captains from the police department where I started thirty years ago. She was my sergeant when I was a rookie, and took me under her wing. We fought some mean folks over the years, side by side, and I grew to trust her with my life. We once arrested a guy who was so disturbed he’d followed the Biblical admonition to pluck his own eye out because it offended him. He’d broken a ketchup bottle in a café and was threatening the patrons with the jagged glass when we rolled up. There happened to be a photographer nearby while we were wrestling the guy down. I don’t remember it being all that fun, but in the picture, we looked like we were having a grand old time. I have the photo from the newspaper in my scrapbook.

            Fights, wrecks, midnight surveillances, protracted fugitive hunts for evil men, horrible bosses  all add to the bond. Old buds never meet after a long absence and grab each other in the backslapping, brotherhood handshake to say: “Man, remember when we had to walk through that field of posies?” No, we want to reminisce about the time we walked barefoot over broken glass—as a team, with a common objective.

Me and Ty, in younger days...

            My friend Ty Cunningham, a ninth degree black belt in jujitsu, helps me work through most every fight in my books. We’ve been friends for twenty years and every time I see him, I can’t help but remember the rough adventures we’ve had together. We’ve camped in fifty-below weather, tracked bad outlaws and even had a run in with a mama grizzly. There has never been a time that he didn’t have my back. I once found myself in a bit of a jam with a couple of outlaw biker types at a nearby lake. We were locked in a little staring match and I seriously thought things might go to guns. Ty had been at the other end of the park, playing catch with his sons but apparently saw what was happening. I was not in a position to turn around, but could tell by the look in the bikers’ eyes that Ty had covered the distance in a flash and now stood behind me, ready to follow me into whatever scrap I’d gotten myself into. There were no questions, only instant resolve—and friendship.

            So, when I write about partners like Trap O’Shannon and Clay Madsen in my Westerns or Jericho Quinn and Jacques Thibodaux in my Thrillers, I know from where I speak. There is a synergy that comes from two strong people working together, completely devoted to each other. There are a couple of people I know I could call, even if I was wrong, who would come a runnin’, with no questions asked. And those people know I would do the same for them. That’s the sort of friendship I like to give the buddies in my books.

My bride and I share that same relationship.  We’ve been through all sorts of hellacious adventures over the last thirty years. Poverty, on the job injuries, long months of separation, the death of a child, cancer, the struggles associated with raising three kids—all just add to the glue. 

Like Danny Glover’s character felt about Mel Gibson, my wife wasn’t too fond of me when we first met. It took us a while to get there, but she came around to my quirky ways. I hope she knows by now that if some bad guy ever puts a bomb under her toilet, I’d stay right there with her like Mel did for Danny.  And, if I ever get blood poisoning and have to get my leg cut off and then ask her to take my body back to Texas to be buried, I have no doubt that she'll just saddle her mule and head south.  You see, we’re just that kind of friends.

Marc Cameron is a retired Chief Deputy US Marshal and 29-year law enforcement veteran. His short stories have appeared in BOYS’ LIFE Magazine and the Saturday Evening Post. He's published ten novels, six of them Westerns (several as a ghost writer and two under his pen name, Mark Henry).   

TIME OF ATTACK fourth in his USA Today Bestselling Jericho Quinn Thriller series, is the newest release from Kensington February of 2014. 

Marc lives in Alaska with his beautiful bride and BMW motorcycle.

Visit him at:

www.marccameronbooks.com 

http://www.facebook.com/MarcCameronAuthor

SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND: Weapons as Characters-- by Marc Cameron

My bride and I were out to dinner not too long ago with another couple. My wife and my friend’s wife are both teachers so they soon fell into deep discussions about the dark arts of education. I’d rather be in a running gun battle than face a bunch of eighth graders every day so my friend and I looked at each other and started our own conversation about deadly weapons—a subject far less dangerous than teaching middle school.
We started talking about what kind of guns we should get our wives—a tried but often failed ploy used by men for decades to get a new gun. Both women hit us with their withering teacher-stares and we switched gears, talking instead about our own favorite weapons—and weapons in movies and books.
Wyatt Earp had his long-nosed Buntline revolver, Mathew Quigley his Shilo Sharps long-range rifle.  Zorro is known for his sword, Jim Bowie for his big honkin’ knife, and Indiana Jones for his bullwhip. Josh Randall might have been just another bounty hunter without his short-barreled Mare’s Leg carbine. Harry Callahan would have had far fewer cool lines if he hadn’t  carried “…a .44 magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world…” And who could forget the captive bolt gun, Anton Chigurh uses in No Country For Old Men?
I could go on and on… Okay, one more.
James Bond carried a diminutive Beretta .25 until a reader named Geoffrey Boothroyd wrote Ian Fleming a letter suggesting that this was a lady’s gun. Fleming was so happy with the criticism and advice that he created a new character named Q (AKA Major Boothroyd) who armed Bond with a Walther PPK.
My point is, a weapon can become as much of a character as the heroes or villains.
In some ways the same is true in real life.
Thirty years ago when I started with a small police department near Fort Worth, few lawdogs carried anything but a revolver—big honkin’ revolvers that could double as a club if the need arose, but more on that later.
Except for the Texas Rangers.  One of my early mentors, Ranger Billy Peterson from Palo Pinto County, was fond of two sayings about the .45. “I carry a .45 because they don’t make a .46.” and “God must have intended us to carry a 1911. Otherwise, he’d never have put that little hollow in the small of our backs.”
It was nothing less than mystifying to a green recruit like me to work alongside a  Ranger wearing the big Colt on his hip. Not to tread on Jim G’s Ranger expertise, because I only claim to have worked with a few, but the men I knew all tricked out their pistols with carved ivory grips or inlaid rubies and the like. You could tell the Ranger if all you saw was his belt rig and sidearm.
I was young and inexperienced, but I knew I wanted that kind of swagger someday.
When the US Marshals hired me, they issued a .357 revolver. They’ve since gone to a uniform pistol (Glock) for everyone, but then, we could carry what we wanted providing it met certain criteria. As soon as I got out of the academy, I put my new revolver in the safe and got me a .45—because, well, you know.
My partner at that time was a former Texas Highway Patrolman and Vietnam veteran of the 173rd Airborne. He could shoot aspirin out of the air with a BB gun and was an incredible shot with his sidearm—a .357 revolver he called Becky Sue.
And boy was she beautiful—deep blue frame with a nickel cylinder, gold plated hammer and trigger and carved metal grips he’d found in Mexico. Becky Sue had class—and so did my partner. He went on to be appointed the US Marshal for East Texas by President G.W. Bush—leaving the rest of us PODs (plain old deputies) in the dust.
My next partner, a former Army Ranger, carried a .45 and was also incredible shot. He was known for carrying three or four knives on his person at any given time, including a push dagger. We got along famously. I went through a series of sidearms and knives over the next few years, trying to settle into my own brand of swagger and style.

My friend Ty and I at a cabin in Alaska. I'm armed here with a .44 Mag revolver--my wilderness gun

A good time to check gun-style status was when we were transporting outlaws. Walla Walla State Prison, in Washington, used a system where they lowered a bucket on a long rope from the guard tower. We would deposit all our guns and knives then watch as they were hauled back up, to see which item the guards ogled over the most. My stainless Smith and Wesson round butt .44 special with silver badges inlaid on pearl grips often won—wish I still had that gun…
Bad guys in real life have their signature weapons as well. Machine Gun Kelly even earned himself a name from his choice. I worked a Dixie Mafia trial in Hattiesburg years ago where one of the defendants was said to have used an icepick on his victims. One of our fugitives was known for using the buckle end of his belt on prostitutes.
These propensities for a favorite weapon often leads investigators straight back to the culprit. Just like boots leave a distinct print on the ground on which they step, weapons leave distinct marks when they do their damage. Caliber, blade size, shape of the blunt object, can all tie the perpetrator to the crime.
I once chased a guy into a little stop and rob after he bailed out of a stolen car. We nearly bowled the poor night clerk over as he ran into the restroom. He made the mistake of shoving a hand down the front of his pants turning what had been a scuffle into me drawing my sidearm. The door swung shut behind me knocking us together, but thankfully I didn’t shoot him. During the ensuing scrap he got clunked on the head with the barrel of my gun, the front sight of which nearly scalped him. Turned out he had a butterfly knife but was really just trying to flush some meth before I got too him. Later, at the hospital while they stapled the wound closed, the doc showed me how it was a good thing I’d told the truth because there were little bits of the orange insert from my front sight embedded in the car thief’s head.
I spend a considerable amount of time assigning particular weapons to the characters in my books, leaning on experience and observation over the years. When I was writing Westerns one of my characters named his guns—and one of those guns was named Clarice after my .44 Special. In my Thrillers, Jericho Quinn carries a Kimber 10mm (looks like my .45) and, in the first three books, a Japanese blade called Gentle Hand. In subsequent books he carries a blade designed by friends of mine called the Severance.  To some, the array of weapons my heroes employ might seem like overkill. But, when your job pushes you to run toward the sound of gunfire, there is no faster reload than a second gun. And, as fan once pointed out, if you’re wearing pants, you really should have a knife—or two.
If we’re doing it right, the weapons we choose as writers should lend a new layer to our characters. A full-grown man with a derringer for instance is a dandy and gambler. A .22 fitted with a suppressor spells assassin, while a Colt Walker just cries out to whack a surely bartender.
And a woman who carries a big gun is, well, pretty darn sexy in my book.  Hear that, sweetheart? 

Marc Cameron is a retired Chief Deputy US Marshal and 29-year law enforcement veteran. His short stories have appeared in BOYS’ LIFE Magazine and the Saturday Evening Post. He's published ten novels, six of them Westerns (several as a ghost writer and two under his pen name, Mark Henry).   

TIME OF ATTACK fourth in his Jericho Quinn Thriller series, will be released from Kensington February of 2014. 

Marc lives in Alaska with his beautiful bride and BMW motorcycle.

Visit him at:

www.marccameronbooks.com http://www.facebook.com/MarcCameronAuthor

Who was that Masked Man?

Movie theaters seem to be replete with super heroes these days. Maybe with the onslaught of  real life villains we see pouring in on us from the airwaves, we have an instinctive wish for, not just persons of incorruptible good, but champions for right, as well. Truth is, there’re plenty of those people in the world, they’re just not bigger than the screen…nor talked about much on the news channels.

Hollywood likes to spin up these marvelous fictitious heroes, mainly because we, the buying public…well, buy into it.  And what are the attributes of these super heroes? He (or she) must be honest, trustworthy, forthright, honorable, resilient, patriotic, faithful, fearless, duty-driven, courageous, young, good-looking, fit, and, of course, invulnerable. One or more super powers can come in handy, too, but aren’t mandatory. Wit, when one lacks in overpowering ability, can serve in its place.

Clayton Moore as The Lone Ranger

This summer it’s Superman and The Lone Ranger. Now, we all know about the Man of Steel. I mean, he’s like the Michael Jordon of super heroes with a dose of George Washington moral fiber thrown in. However, he’s more eastern urban than western hero, so let’s concentrate on TLR and the time-honored question, “Who was that Masked Man?”

Take a look at TLR’s hero characteristics: He was a loner; he rode with an American Indian sidekick; he concealed his identity with a black mask; he roamed “the West” bringing to justice all manner of bad guys; he had a beautiful, fast horse; he would often wear disguises to out-wit unsuspecting outlaws; he would leave a silver bullet as his calling card; he started out in Detroit.

There are those who think the tales of the Lone Ranger originated from the life of a legendary western lawman named Bass Reeves.

Deputy U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves worked for Judge Isaac Parker’s U.S. District Court out of Ft. Smith, Arkansas from about 1875 to 1905. Deputy marshals for the “Hanging Judge” would roam far into the rough, untamed, and lawless land called Indian Territory to arrest wrongdoers.

From its inception in 1789 the U.S. Marshals Service has lost over 200 deputies in the line of duty.

More than 120 of those were killed in Indian and Oklahoma Territories prior to Oklahoma statehood in 1907. So it’s interesting to note that during Bass Reeves’ 30 years as a lawman in one of the most dangerous areas of the old west, he received nary even a bullet wound. Several times he had his hat shot off, once a bullet ripped a button from his coat, another time a slug fired from a Colt .44 cut the reins he held while sitting astride his horse. Invulnerability? Check.

Bass Reeves, an ex-slave, belonged to a Confederate Colonel named George R. Reeves of the 11^th Texas Cavalry, who brought Bass along as his personal servant on his campaigns. Some historians believe Bass fought alongside Col. (later Gen.) Stand Watie’s Cherokee soldiers at the Battle of Pea Ridge, Arkansas. Bass ran away from his enslavement after he and his colonel got into an altercation over a card game one night and Bass punched out his master. Fleeing into Indian Territory, he was taken in by members of the Creek Nation with whom he lived for several years.

In the back story of TLR, he was left for dead when a party of Texas Rangers, with whom he rode prior to becoming TLR, were ambushed by outlaws. But he is found by an Indian, who recognized the pre-TLR as a man who’d once saved his life, and so, nursed him back to health. Enter the famous Tonto.

Teaching a slave to read in the pre-Civil War South was considered a bad idea, so Bass was illiterate;

Bass Reeves

however, he was far from stupid. As a deputy he had to carry and serve warrants and writs for those whom he pursued. He devised astute ways to identify which writs were for which outlaw, and never arrested the wrong person, over 3,000 of them. He also got help from trusted possemen who could read. It’s believed one or two of those were Indians.

Black people in post-Civil War America were largely invisible. That is, no matter their station, no matter their accomplishments, they were ignored by the predominantly white population. Although Bass Reeves was perhaps one of the most courageous, dogged, duty-bound, and successful lawmen in terms of chasing down and bringing in bad guys, he was rarely recognized as such in news accounts. Having a black man arrest a white man, even the dirtiest of lowdown no account polecats, was highly frowned upon in “polite” society. Most times, newspaper accounts gave white deputies credit for Reeves’ arrests. Thus, his black face was his mask.

Bass would also use disguises to work his way among and arrest desperados. In one tale he put on ragged clothes, an old floppy hat, and heelless shoes then walked several miles to the home of two fugitive brothers. He looked every bit the downtrodden tramp, and told the boys’ ma he’d been running from the law, asking if he could get something to eat. She invited him in. When the brothers returned they struck up a friendship with the affable Reeves, and as the evening wore on agreed to let Bass join up with them in their ongoing outlawry, inviting him to spend the night. Once everyone was asleep, Bass slapped the brothers in cuffs, awakened them and informed them of their arrest. As he marched them off on foot back toward his distant camp, the boys’ ma followed along berating the deputy and cussing him fiercely.

Bass always had fine, fast horses. In fact, prior to his deputying days, he developed a good reputation for raising and training horses, selling many of his animals to the deputies he knew. He kept the best and fastest for himself, though. No doubt one or two were gray…or silver.

Bass didn’t use or give away silver bullets, but when he was out and about in the Territory, he would often get meals, lodging, and intel from local residents. It’s said he had a habit of leaving his hosts a silver dollar before he rode off.

As to the Detroit connection, many of the felons Reeves brought to justice were sent to the Detroit House of Corrections. Tales of the Lone Ranger began on the radio in Detroit in 1933. Maybe a tenuous connection, but it’s possible legendary stories of Deputy U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves came from some of those in that Detroit jail who’d had personal dealings with that man in the black mask.




Phil Truman has authored three of what he calls, “Oklahoma-centric” novels.  Red Lands Outlaw, the Ballad of Henry Starr  a historical novel about the life and times of an Oklahoma outlaw, was a 2013 Peacemaker Award nominee and finalist for the 2013 Will Rogers Medallion for Western Fiction. His novel GAME, an American Novel is a sports inspirational about small town schoolboy football. Legends of Tsalagee weaves a tale of mystery and adventure in a small town. He has won numerous awards for his short fiction, and his western short story “Last Will for an Outlaw” appears in LaFrontera Publishing’s anthology, Dead or Alive, released June 2013.

Phil’s website is: http://philtrumanink.com/