Negroes and the Gun (26 page)

Technically the Ashworths were mixed-race people. At least one of the brothers was reportedly married to a white woman, although the distinction between them would have been difficult to discern just by looking. But the Ashworth's African lineage was sufficiently recorded that it took an act of the Texas Congress in 1840 to exempt them from legislation requiring free blacks to leave the republic.

This was quite a political feat for any Negro in the nineteenth century, and it reflected the bonds of business, family, and friendship that the Ashworths had built among the whites of east Texas. This included the county sheriff who, through business interests or some vague family connection, was a staunch ally of the Ashworths'.
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The Orange County War started over a hog. Clark Ashworth was charged with stealing it. And the proud Ashworth clan took offense at the accusation. The deputy who arrested Clark Ashworth for hog theft was from a different local faction than the sheriff. When Sam Ashworth confronted him, the deputy arrested Sam too, citing a law that punished “abusive language by Negroes.”

After a trial where Sam Ashworth's African lineage was established by witnesses who said they considered him mulatto, the judge sentenced him to “thirty lashes on the bareback.” The sentence was never executed because Sam's ally, the sheriff, allowed him to escape. But now Sam Ashworth had been provoked beyond consoling and plotted revenge. Aided by one of his younger cousins, Sam Ashworth laid an ambush for the deputy. They killed him with a barrage of shotgun and pistol fire. The sheriff went through the motions of investigating the shooting. But his allegiance was to the Ashworths.

Disgusted by the sheriff's perfunctory investigation, a faction of men who had long despised the Ashworths organized a gang of “Moderators” who rode down on the Negro community, burning houses and barns and warning them to leave the county. The sheriff organized a competing interracial force of “Regulators.” After a series of gun battles with casualties on both sides, the Moderators prevailed, killing the sheriff and chasing Negro families across the border into Louisiana.

Sam Ashworth fled into Indian Territory, where he lived with the Choctaws until the beginning of the Civil War. And in demonstration of his odd status as a slave-owning Negro with few discernible African characteristics, he joined the Army of the Confederacy and was killed in 1862 at the Battle of Shiloh.
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The experience of Greenburry Logan was less dramatic and maybe more typical of free Negroes in prewar Texas. Logan arrived in 1831, answering Stephen Austin's call for settlers. He was wounded fighting in the war for independence from Mexico and was granted Texas citizenship. His hapless appeal for exemptions from the
race-coded disabilities that had taken hold in Texas by 1841 suggests that he had fewer or less powerful friends in the establishment than did Aaron Ashworth.

I cam here in 1831 invited by Col. Austin. I got letters of sittizeship . . . and one quarter league of land insted of a third. But I love the country and did stay because I felt myself mower of a free man then in the states. It is also known that Logan was in every fite with the Maxacans during the camppain of 35 until Bexhar was taken in which event I was the 3rd man that fell. Every previleg dear to a free man is taken away and Logan libel to be imposed upon by eny that choose to doo it. No chance to collect the debt without witness, no vote or say in eny way yet liable for Taxes.
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Greenburry Logan's appeal to the Texas Congress fell on deaf ears, his fighting sacrifices for the republic dismissed as an inconvenient footnote to the bourgeoning slaveocracy.

The black experience in the west was plainly impacted by the secession of Texas from the union. Fifty Thousand Texans fought for the Confederacy, and that allegiance resonated in the postwar period. Just as in the southeast, the Ku Klux Klan was active in the west, and former Confederates focused their ire on “lawless” freedmen, complaining about free Negroes “getting drunk, flourishing weapons, stealing horses and insulting whites.” While there was no doubting an element of criminality among the freedmen, there also were abundant legitimate reasons for them to own and carry firearms.
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Negroes were an integral part of the culture of the open range, where the boon of free grazing fueled the famous cattle drives and legends of longhorn steers and salty men on horseback. Of the estimated thirty-five thousand men who worked the western trail drives, roughly one third were Negroes and Mexican, and the majority of that fraction were black. One detailed study estimates that of the typical eight-man trail crew, two or three men would have been Negroes.
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The vastness of the American west created demands and opportunities that add a peculiar layer to the black tradition of arms. Something about the space or the culture, particularly the life of the black cowboy, sometimes lent a more benign character to the prevailing racism. Against intuition, we find numerous reports of armed black heroes risking their lives for friends across racial lines.

We learn by happenstance of the Negro cowboy named Lige, who repelled a ruffian named Sam Grant with gunfire after Grant ambushed Charlie Siringo. Siringo produced one of the first factual memoirs published by a cowboy and provided sufficient accounts of Negroes to support the conclusion that blacks were a good fraction of the population.

The presence of blacks in the west is also memorialized in the landscape, in
places like Nigger Hill, Nigger Creek, and Nigger Gulch, named for the black prospectors who worked mining claims in those areas. Often the evidence of individual Negroes appears in the invective or perhaps just the descriptor
nigger
before their given name—men paid wages under the names “Nigger Jeff,” “Nigger Newt,” and “Nigger Bob.”
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The possibility that
nigger
was more descriptor than an insult is evident in attempts to compliment the talents or toughness of men called “Nigger Add” and “Nigger Jim.” Nigger Add was revered as a horse breaker, gave orders to white men, and, after he had topped out in the ranch hierarchy, commented that he would “run this outfit if not for this old black skin.”

“Nigger Jim” Kelly commanded similar respect as the top hand of Texas rancher Print Olive. When Olive was ambushed in a Kansas saloon in 1872, Kelly flew to the rescue with gunfire and saved Olive's life. Print Olive's respect for Kelly and Kelly's reputation for toughness sometimes smoothed the sharp edges of cow-town racism. When an Irish saloonkeeper refused to serve him, Kelly moved his hand to the hilt of his six-gun. White cowboys intervened, advising the barkeep, “That's Nigger Jim, Print Olive's bad nigger. Pay you treat him right.”

A similar scene played out in Abilene in 1870 when a saddle-weary trail crew camped on the outskirts of town and then rode in seeking entertainment. Their black cook consumed more than his share of cheap whiskey and started firing his revolver into the air. The booming cow town had just built a new jail, and the black cook was its first occupant. His stay was cut short when his hungry trail mates broke him out at gunpoint, making him both the first prisoner and the first escapee from the new jail.

No doubt there was plenty of discrimination and racial harassment in the cow towns that led to gunfire. And sometimes, as in the case of John Hayes, Negroes did all of the shooting. John Hayes was refused service in a saloon that was attempting a “whites only” policy. Hayes, with a budding reputation as the “Texas Kid,” drew his revolver and shot up the saloon.

John Hayes's violence was gratuitous. But Henry Hilton was literally pulled into a fight that ended in deadly gunfire. Hilton owned a small ranch near Dodge City, Kansas. He was in town for provisions when a group of white cowboys aimed to make sport of him. They exchanged tough talk, and Hilton warned them that he would not stand for any “hazing, even if he was a nigger.” Then one of the men lassoed him and tried to pull him off his horse. Hilton drew his revolver and killed the man. Before he could appear on the shooting charge, Hilton got into a late-night saloon brawl with a black cowboy named Bill Smith over some unrecorded slight. The two men emptied their revolvers and died from their wounds.

This was not the only time black cowboys shot one another. In the winter of 1870, the
Laramie Weekly Sentinel
reported that a man named Pressley Wall
was shot and killed at the Bullard Saloon by Littleton Lawrence, “both colored.” In Cheyenne, an argument at a black prostitute's crib left a Negro known only as Dozier limping to the train station, bleeding from three bullet wounds presumably from a black assailant.
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Although film depictions suggest otherwise, blacks participated on both sides of the infamous Lincoln County War that propelled Billy the Kid into legend. At least three black men rode with Billy the Kid. Riding with the opposing forces were “Negro” (probably “Nigger”) John Clark, as well as a detachment of black cavalry. At least one of these black men, George Washington, survived the conflict to join territorial governor Lew Wallace's Lincoln County Riflemen in 1879. For a short, violent period, the Lincoln County Riflemen were the dominant force for order in the tumultuous environment.
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Black men figure prominently in other, less famous conflicts. In 1883, a black cowboy who answered to “Nigger Jeff” went with his employer, rancher Dick Grier, into Mexico on an invitation to buy cattle. It turned out to be an ambush, and only three of Grier's group made it out alive. One of them was “Nigger Jeff,” who covered the retreat of his trail mates with gunfire and then escaped to nurse his own wounds. Other Negroes of the west pursued less honorable paths—men like the nameless gunfighter who was contracted to kill another bad man named Mexican Joe. Mexican Joe was quicker on the trigger.

The recorded story of the black west often focuses on the sensational—the bloody, boozy conflicts that rose to the level of news. The countless less colorful folk who populated the west and made decisions to acquire and carry arms can only be guessed at. We are left mainly to speculate about the practice of arms among the field hands, stockyard workers, miners, saloon entertainers, prostitutes, hoteliers, and ordinary black settlers who populated the American west.
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But even within this category of more pedestrian firearms use, colorful tales of men like Willis Peoples survive. Peoples owned a small ranch near Mead, Kansas. The community was agitated about a large wolf that had been killing cattle, and raised a reward for the wolf's hide. Peoples said that if they would leave the wolf alone and give him a few weeks, he would bring it in. Peoples trailed the animal, stalked within fifty feet of it, and killed it with a rifle shot to the head. Riding into town with a nearly seven-foot-long wolf carcass, Peoples became a minor celebrity.

We are also generally left guessing about episodes where men simply brandished guns to staunch some threat or drew guns on one another, then backed down. An 1881 report from Raton, New Mexico, confirms the second category. A Negro and a white cowboy pulled their six-guns over some slight and then backed away without firing. We learn about this averted violence incidentally within the story of the white cowboy dying later that evening in a shootout with another man.
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The power of bluster and bluff is underscored in the autobiographical account of Nat Love, also known as Deadwood Dick. At least by his own telling, Nat Love had a talent for otherworldly marksmanship. His stories and self-proclaimed reputation hit all of the stereotypes of western exploits with the gun. Love was a self-promoter whose grand depictions of his multilayered prowess invite worries that some of his claims are exaggerated or fictitious.
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But the dubious exploits of men like Nat Love gain a degree of credence in light of similar, more readily verifiable adventures of other improbable Negro cowboys.

Some of the best records of blacks in the frontier west come out of the effort to bring a measure of law to Indian Territory. It is not only lawbreakers but also black lawmen who frame the scene. What passed for law in the territory was mainly federal, and starting in 1875, was famously administered out of Fort Smith, Arkansas, by hanging Judge Charles Parker. Parker's records chronicle a significant black presence in the violent territory. Among the criminals who came before him, Parker hanged thirty whites, twenty-six Indians, and twenty-three blacks.

The black population in Indian Territory also produced abundant lesser criminal activity and armed conflicts fulfilling the stereotypes of western violence. It hosted notorious black outlaws like Dick Glass and Crawford Goldsby. Glass led a life of violence and crime that ended in 1885 in a shootout with Indian policeman Sam Sixkiller.
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Crawford Goldsby survived long enough to build a bigger legend. He was the son of a black woman with Indian and European linage and a light-skinned Buffalo Soldier named George Goldsby, who sometimes passed for Mexican. George disappeared when Crawford was only two years old, under circumstances that are interesting in their own right.

In 1878, Sergeant George Goldsby commanded a squad of black soldiers at Fort Concho, Texas. The relationship between white Texans and the Buffalo Soldiers was often tense. There were the typical racial taunts. And sometimes whites took potshots at the black troopers who traveled around Texas towns and homesteads. After one of these episodes, George Goldsby allowed his soldiers to take their rifles to settle a dispute with some local whites. With the shooting done, unwilling to trust the army's judgment of his decision, Goldsby fled and never saw his wife or son again.

With his father on the run, young Crawford Goldsby was shipped east to the Indian school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. When he returned west as a teenager, he was physically a man and soon found a man's trouble. A saloon quarrel with an older Negro cowboy led to drawn guns and Crawford fleeing the scene as a killer. Sometime during this period, Goldsby picked up the name Cherokee Bill. He answered to it when he joined the Cook Gang, a mostly black outlaw band, some of them ex-slaves of Cherokee Indians.