Essays
Moseying: History of the Southern Llano Estacado
Gunfights and outlaws of west Texas
February 4, 2004
Over in Pecos, a person can see the grave of Clay Allison, one of the infamous gunfighters of the old west. Allison had only lived in the area a few months before falling off his wagon drunk and breaking his neck. There were other gunfighters in the old days within 150 miles of Midland, who killed men and committed crimes. Some are remembered in the legends of the region, while others are forgotten. After seeing a display about Clay Allison in the West of the Pecos Museum in Pecos, I decided to investigate that side of our history.
A visit to the library produced a number of books. I mentioned the project to Ernie Johnson, the retired Lee High School baseball coach, and he came with his arms full of Old West and Frontier Times magazines with articles of west Texas gunfighters, and even brought an encyclopedia of gunfighters!
It puzzles me that the museum in Pecos does not have any displays about Deacon Jim Miller -- he was about the sorriest character that ever lived in the region. Well… John Selman might have been worse. Both of them sometimes rode on the side of the law, but abused their position, which makes them worse than a badman without pretensions.
When Miller arrived in Pecos in 1891, he hired on as a deputy to Sheriff George Frazer. Frazer did not know that been accused and tried (but acquitted) for his grandparents' murders at age 8 and brother-in-law's murder at age 17, and had likely killed the Ballinger city marshal. Miller did not drink or smoke, and became a member of a local church. He wore a black broadcloth coat, black boots, and black Stetson. Thanks to his appearance and churchgoing ways he became known as Deacon Jim. He married Sallie Clements and her brother Little Mannen Clements (a cousin to then-imprisoned outlaw John Wesley Hardin) became another deputy. Not long afterwards, cattle rustling and horse theft increased all along the Pecos River Valley. Miller spent most of the time "looking for rustlers," but never caught any.
Sheriff Frazer's brother-in-law, Barney Riggs, accused Miller of being involved in the rustling. A few weeks later, Miller killed a prisoner trying to escape. Riggs said that the prisoner had known where Miller had hidden some stolen mules -- and Frazer found the mules where Riggs had indicated they might be. He immediately fired Miller. Miller's church friends supported his election as the city marshal in 1892. In 1893, Frazer was out of town, and Miller, Clements, and other gunmen took over the town until Frazer returned. He managed to get Miller fired, so Miller opened a hotel.
In 1894, after the man that had sent the telegram to Frazer about Miller taking over the town had been murdered, Frazer confronted Miller. Frazer sent 3 bullets into the black coat right over Miller's heart. Miller went down, but got back up -- he always wore the black coat because it had a steel plate sewed into its fabric. Miller vowed revenge, and a few months later, he stuck his shotgun through a saloon door in Toyah where Frazer sat playing cards. Miller was jailed in Pecos for the killing, and later tried in Eastland. He was acquitted, because he had spent the intervening time witnessing at prayer meetings about his devotion to God.
Miller became known as a contract killer, but due to his church connections kept escaping the hangman's noose. In 1909 he was arrested after killing a man in Ada, Oklahoma. He hired Moman Pruitt, a legendary defense attorney. The citizens of Ada, deciding that Pruitt would get Miller acquitted, hung him and three co-conspirators in a livery stable.
The story of Miller was new to me before I started looking into the subject. I already knew about the story of John Selman. In 1876 John Larn was sworn in as the sheriff of Shackleford county. Selman was his deputy. Along with a number of other men they became vigilantes, catching cattle and horse thieves and hanging them without jury trial. The local newspaper defended their actions, but although Captain H.L. Arrington of the Texas Rangers came and investigated, but did not file charges. People began to notice that Larn and Selman's own cattleherds increased at a rate beyond nature's. Larn and Selman became inspectors of hides and animals, stopping every cattle drive through the area, and pocketed a hundred dollars for every herd they "inspected." They also won the bid for supplying beef to Fort Griffin. Finally the rangers returned and found cattle hides of brands not their own sunk in the Brazos River at Larn's ranch, but they professed no knowledge of their origin, so charges were not filed. A year later, the rangers captured Hurricane Bill Martin who spilled all he knew about Larn's operations. Larn was caught, and killed by 15 men that came to the jail and emptied their rifles into him.
Selman got away and headed west, and on the Llano Estacado plundered the chuckwagon accompanying a horse herd and stole the guns of the cowboys. He spent the next two years fighting in the Lincoln County War, heading up a group called Selman's Scouts, doing the bidding of merchants Dolan and Murphy. When it wound down, 50 hardcases under his direction made plans to attack Fort Union in New Mexico and set up their own fiefdom, but Selman contracted smallpox.
He eventually recovered and became the jailer at Fort Stockton. From that position of responsibility, he communicated with his old cohorts hiding in the Davis Mountains who stole livestock and robbed stores at his bidding. Unable to get proof of his connection with the outlaws in the hills, eventually the rangers arrested him on the old charges at Albany, but he was never brought to trial due to the lack of witnesses willing to testify. He finally ended up in El Paso as a City Marshall, where he was finally killed by another lawman.
These two stories illustrate the fact that a few men, when placed in positions of authority, come to believe that they themselves are the authority that they represent. Once their egos swell, their self-righteousness blinds their sense of right and wrong. Other gunmen of the old days were just outright bad guys. The most infamous of our regional badmen was Black Jack Ketchum.
Tom (Black Jack) Ketchum was bad as a kid. As a young teenager, he was arrested in San Angelo for shooting a dog at church. When a girl spurned him, he whipped himself with his gun. For a while he would hire on as a cowboy, but the work was too much for him. By his mid-twenties he had become a trainrobber. By 1890 he became part of the Hole-in-the-wall Gang, along with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, operating from Montana to Arizona. Butch and Sundance went to South America, but Black Jack kept robbing trains in New Mexico, where he was finally caught and hung in Clayton in 1899. Some of his partners continued the "profession" -- the last two, Ben Kilpatrick and Ed Welch, were killed in 1912, robbing a train near Sanderson. I love to search out the memoirs of the early settlers of west Texas and eastern New Mexico, and in over a dozen of them I have found where the writer tells of a time when he hosted Black Jack at a night's camp. Usually Black Jack would leave with somebody's gun, horse, and in one story, a brand new yellow rain slicker. When I go camping, I keep expecting his ghost to come riding up to my campfire!