The Mammoth Book of the West: New Edition by Jon E. Lewis

Author:Jon E. Lewis [Lewis, Jon E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, Civil War Period (1850-1877)
ISBN: 9781780337005
Publisher: Constable & Robinson Limited
Published: 2012-03-01T07:18:50+00:00

Black Outlaws

But Blacks were not only on the receiving end of outlaw guns, they gave death and crime as well as taking it. Born into slavery in Arkansas in 1849, Isom Dart began his life in crime pilfering for Confederate officers during the Civil War. After the war he joined a young Mexican stealing cattle south of the border to sell in Texas, then transferred his rustling activity to rugged Brown’s Park, Colorado, a haven for cattle thieves. Periodically, Dart tried to “go straight” and earned a local reputation as bronc-buster, but always ended up back in the rustler’s saddle. On one notable occasion he was arrested by a Wyoming deputy sheriff who was then injured when his buckboard left the road. The uninjured Dart gathered up the horses, lifted the buckboard onto its wheels, loaded on the deputy and drove to the hospital at Rock Springs. There, Dart turned himself in at the town jail. The impressed officials immediately let him go. Local cattle barons were less impressed. Dart was assassinated in 1900, probably by the cattlemen’s hired killer, Tom Horn.

Cherokee Bill was a Black Billy the Kid, sharing with the latter a youthful impulsiveness, a love of guns, and a life cut short at the age of 21. Cherokee Bill was born Cranford Goldsby on the military reservation of Fort Concho, Texas, where his father was a buffalo soldier (as Black servicemen became known, on account of their wiry hair, which Indians said reminded them of the bison) in the famed 10th Cavalry. When the family split up and his mother remarried, the teenage Cranford was pushed out on his own and fell in with bad company. At 18 he had his first gunfight, wounding a middle-aged Black man who had beaten him with his fists. Afterwards, he roamed the Cherokee, Seminole and Creek Nations and joined the outlaw gang of Jim and Bill Cook. Unlike White outlaws, the Black Cherokee Bill (who also had Indian blood, hence the nickname) could travel Oklahoma’s Indian lands without interference, something which gave him a distinct advantage over the posses who pursued him for his persistent armed robberies of stores and railroads. Finally, at the age of 20 Cherokee Bill was caught and sentenced to die for murder (it was claimed that he had managed to kill 13 men in his two-year run, and Judge Parker called him an “inhuman monster”). On a fine day in 1896 Cherokee Bill was taken into the courtyard at Fort Smith to be hanged. Looking up at the sky he remarked, “This is about as good a day as any to die.” At the instruction of the guard he stood over the trap. Asked if he had any last words, Cherokee came out with one of the West’s best epitaphs: “I came here to die, not make a speech.”

Unlike Dart and Cherokee Bill, Dodge City Black outlaw Ben Hodges died of old age, expiring in 1929. Photographs show Hodges toting a shotgun, but he tended to rely on his wits and tongue above firearms.

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