Hornswogglers, Fourflushers & Snake-Oil Salesmen (2 page)

But what of someone such as Doc Baggs, Denver's Gentleman Con Artist? He allegedly never bilked anyone who couldn't afford it—and who wasn't looking to do the same to him. Certainly there's more gray area there. Or take someone such as Umbrella Jim Miner, the Poet Gambler. He never forced anyone to bet against him or his shell game, and he always warned folks beforehand, in poetic patter, that they were about to become his victims. Surely fair warning counts in his favor. And yet, he manipulated the shells in such a way that he never lost. Those odds are too good to be true. And so, Umbrella Jim was indeed a swindler.

Astute readers will notice a distinct dearth of lady swindlers herein. That's not to say they didn't exist, but the swindlers who danced in the spotlight were by far men. That's also much the case today, where a study of deceit-related headlines shows politicians, industrialists, televangelists, infomercial hawkers, and online hucksters as primarily of the male persuasion.

However, a number of Old West women were notable gamblers, among them Lottie Deno and Kitty LeRoy. And there were numerous memorable madams, too, proprietresses of houses of ill repute, often soiled doves themselves, who gladly filched wallets and gold pokes from smiling, spent patrons.

While it's tempting to consider such amazing charlatans as James Peralta-Reavis or Death Valley Scotty as the greatest swindlers ever—and they truly were singular pieces of nasty work—such a case can never fully be made, because new swindlers pop up every day (should you have your doubts, take a look at traffic medians come election time). But the primary reason we may never know who is the greatest swindler of all time is because that person will forever remain unknown—precisely because such swindlers are so good at what they do, no one will ever find out who they are.

During the research and writing of this book, I had to ask myself a number of difficult-to-answer questions such as: Is a thief a swindler? And I came to the conclusion that while all swindlers are essentially thieves, not all thieves are swindlers. If a horse-and-cattle rustler such as Dutch Henry Born were to sell back to a man the same horse he'd stolen from him (which is exactly what he did), that qualifies as a swindle.

At various points I used poetic license by adding dialogue and supporting characters where firsthand accounts were scarce. That said, a surprising and gratifying number of accounts of our rascals in action exist in the pages of historical archives. No doubt this has everything to do with the public's perennial preoccupation with ne'er-do-wells.

This book represents a mere sampling of the huge variety of mountebanks and cheats who roved the plains and mountains and paddled the rivers and coasts of the Old West. To attempt to include them all would be impossible. And yet, there are so many more who deserve a good airing. Take Clay Wilson, a small-time con man who murdered a notorious gambler named Jim Moon. For years Wilson had been a hired goon who worked for a number of big-time con men—Doc Baggs, Soapy Smith, John Bull.

Wilson also kept a journal the entire time—no doubt planning to use it to swindle his powerful employers. The journal seemed harmless, filled as it was with indecipherable writing his colleagues referred to as “chicken scratches.” Eventually the police ended up with the journal and their reaction was much the same. They turned it over to a university, where after analysis it was determined Wilson had been jotting down valuable information all along—in perfectly rendered Sanskrit. The lesson? Never judge a polecat by his chicken scratch.

It has been great fun to discover salacious facts about people who set out to take advantage of others, all the while knowing full well what they are up to is not right. There has to be a moral baseline in each of us, some level to which we recognize it is unfair, unwise, and unjust to stoop below. Does that mean we don't do so? Hardly. We all are guilty of transgressions, even the slightest, even if we only admit them to ourselves. But most of us attempt to rise above them and try not to repeat them. That is what counts, and it is one of the few things that separates us from the sleazy at heart, the swindlers, the hucksters, the opportunists willing to transgress, time and again, to make a buck, to feel the deep-down tingle success over a mark brings.

Perhaps I have thought about this overly much, but then I have spent a fair amount of time of late in the company of cheats, rascals, and rogues—even if only in a historical context. Time will tell if their oiliness has rubbed off on me. . . .

In the meantime, I offer one bit of advice I gleaned from Umbrella Jim's poetic pitch: Keep yer eyes on the pea!

—Matthew P. Mayo

Summer 2015

H
e felt the flames of the angry crowd's torches licking at his thin-soled boots, heard the gabbling shrieks calling for his head, his neck, and other valued parts of his anatomy, and then Edward Zane Carroll Judson, also quite well known at the time as famed writer Ned Buntline, made a daring escape. At least that is how such a moment would play out in one of his own ripping yarns. In truth, his escape was impressive, though not in the way he might have preferred. . . .

The awning frame from which his portly form clung surrendered with a snap (perhaps under the tremendous weight of Judson's bloated ego), and he dropped three stories to the hard-packed earth, jolting his weary bones. But Buntline had little time to check on his own physical state, for law enforcement bulled through the angry congregants swarming the fallen man and hustled him off to jail.

As he stewed in his cell, rubbing his swelling ankles and gnawing his lower lip, Buntline may well have—or should have—ruminated on what event or chain of them had brought him to this lowly locale.

“How,” one surmises Judson may well have wondered, “did I come to such an ignoble impasse?”

And if he were honest with himself, it wasn't much of an effort to trace back the timeline to how indeed Buntline managed to find himself alone in a dank jail cell in 1846, in Nashville, Tennessee, awaiting news of his very future. He'd been in town innocently enough, promoting the latest of his various publishing attempts, a magazine called
Ned Buntline's Own
.

It appears the charismatic and very much married Judson had been caught in mid-dalliance with one equally married Mrs. Robert Porterfield. And it was Robert Porterfield himself who caught the pair of paramours flirting. He produced a pistol and cranked off a poorly aimed shot at squealing Ned who, also armed, returned fire. Ned's shot, as one would expect from a self-proclaimed “expert marksman,” found its target—somewhat—for it pierced Mr. Porterfield just above the left eye. It seems that the shot didn't lay Porterfield too low just yet, but our intrepid Buntline wisely gave himself over to the authorities.

There was a hearing the next day, and Ned pleaded that it was a pure and simple case of self-defense, something to which the wounded man's brother—along with a few of the wounded man's friends—took offense. They unholstered their own firearms and proceeded to open fire at Buntline in the courtroom.

But wait—there's more! Agitated Ned, feeling most aggrieved and not a little surrounded, took the one opportunity that presented itself—the only one he felt gave him a modicum of a chance, anyway, and dashed out of the courthouse, across the street, and into a hotel. The mob from the courthouse, as well as others following the action outside, were in hot pursuit of portly Buntline, and they rained rocks and yet more bullets at the hapless lothario. He bolted up the hotel's stairwells, all the way to the third floor. But not before he was dealt a painful wound in the chest with a rock.

With the mob closing in, Buntline jumped from a third-floor window. He aimed for the awning, it broke, and that's when he dropped like a stone to the ground many feet below, from where he was hauled off to the hoosegow.

And that's precisely when he found himself in the jail, wondering about his fate, and heard shouts—the mob again—but this time it sounded louder, closer, angrier, and more plentiful. As it turns out, the mob was all these things, and for good reason: It seems his sweetie's husband, Robert Porterfield, succumbed to the bullet wound Buntline had delivered. Incensed friends, family, and anyone else with an ax to grind and a drink in his belly, mobbed up and descended on the jail.

The seething throng wasted no time in overpowering the night guard, procured the keys to the cell, and dragged the howling, protesting Ned Buntline out. They continued to drag him until they reached the town square, where someone hastily rigged up a rope with a noose at the end, dangling from a convenient post.

Despite his screams of innocence, Buntline was strung up and hanged.

Yes, hanged. By the neck.

But in typical Ned Buntline fashion, in what could well have been a breathless escape from the pages of one of his very own pages of purple prose, he made a daring escape. As his full weight dropped down, stretching the hanging rope to capacity, the hastily worked hempen necktie snapped, as luck—and a few well-placed friends in attendance—would have it. Other versions of the story claim that his friends cut him down and smuggled him out of the hot seat, whisking him away before the crowd redoubled its bloodlust.

Either way, it makes for riveting reading, and Buntline lived to dally another day. He once again appeared in court, and, owing largely to the overly zealous crowd's vigilante activities, the judge let him go. Curiously enough, though not surprisingly, Buntline would tell audiences after the incident that the chest wound he'd received from the mob's rock was in fact a painful reminder left by an Apache arrow. And his public, aware of the truth or not, lapped it up like kittens at a bowl of cream.

In a letter to a local newspaper following the incident, Buntline made hay with the events and was able to convince himself, if not what he imagined to be a vast and admiring public, that he had suffered greater injuries and injustices than he actually had. Though considering all he underwent, it's a wonder he felt compelled to embellish the proceedings at all.

I hasten to tell you that I am worth ten “dead” men yet. . . . I expect to leave here for the East in three or four days. I cannot yet rise from my bed; my left arm and leg are helpless, and my whole left side is sadly bruised. Out of twenty-three shots, all within ten steps, the pistols seven times touching my body, I was slightly hit by three only. I fell forty-seven feet three inches (measured), on hard, rocky ground, and not a bone cracked! Thus God told them I was innocent. As God is my judge, I never wronged Robert Porterfield. My enemies poisoned his ears, and foully belied me. I tried to avoid harming him, and calmly talked with him while he fired three shots at me, each shot grazing my person. I did not fire till I saw that he was determined to kill me, and then I fired but once. Gross injustice has been done me in the published descriptions of the affair. . . . I shall not be tried; the grand jury have set, and no bill has been found against me. The mob was raised by and composed of men who were my enemies on other accounts than the death of Porterfield. They were the persons whom I used to score in my little paper
, Ned Buntline's Own
. . . . The rope did not break; it was cut by a friend. . . . Mr. Porterfield was a brave, good, but rash and hasty man; . . . His wife is as innocent as an angel. No proof has ever been advanced that I ever touched her hand
.

None of this slowed Ned, who continued to have dalliances with women other than his wives and to whom other men were married. Some folks never learn. Others never want to. Others, such as Buntline, refuse to, probably because they're having way too much fun.

And that is but one of dozens, perhaps more, of the amazing stories that together make up the real and imagined life of one Edward Zane Carroll Judson, as Ned Buntline, at one time America's highest-paid author. Arguably he was, more than any other, the man who made the men who made the mythic West. He was undoubtedly a remarkable and a largely self-made man who led an extraordinary life. The gleam of his documented accomplishments can only be outshone by the harsh glare from his all-too-real less-than-savory exploits.

Our hero was born in Harpersfield, New York, on March 20, 1821, to Bethany and Levi Carroll Judson. When but a lad of thirteen in 1834, young Edward had a dust-up with his lawyer father. It seems that dear old dad wanted him to pursue law. Young Edward resisted and the two came to blows. Edward left home and headed straight for the sea—the very career path he'd long pined for, and one his father had ridiculed.

He ended up as a cabin boy on a ship, the first of a long list of vessels that hosted the young sailor. By the next year Judson tasted fame for the first time for a selfless act of heroism. He dove into New York's East River, with little regard for his personal safety, and helped rescue a boat's crew from drowning. In true Buntline fashion it was an incident he would later brag about—much in keeping with his lifelong lack of humility.