Excerpt: Famous Firearms of the Old West, by Hal Herring

By Hal Herring, 11-29-08

Simply put, Hal Herring's new book, Famous Firearms of the Old West (Hardcover, TwoDot, $24.95, hardcover) is a collection of stories about 12 guns that shaped the history of a region.

But while the firearms, owned by the likes of Geronimo, Wild Bill Hickock and Western gunman Tom Horn, are the fulcrum of the book, the masterful storytelling -- of the hands that held them, the battles that revolved around them and the historical context in which they fired -- is what makes the book sing.

As Herring, a NewWest.Net contributor, writes in the preface, the guns "exist now as windows into the men and women who fought -- righteously or not -- and died, or were willing to die, with them. What they conjure up can be a powerful magic."

That "powerful magic," captured by one of the region's best writers, is what sets this book apart.

In the following excerpt, Chapter 9, Herring tells the story of Tom Horn, one of the West's most famous bounty hunters, and his Winchester Model 1894 rifle. -Courtney Lowery


CHAPTER NINE

Tom Horn’s Winchester Model 1894 Rifle

At the time that Horn owned his .30–30 Winchester, it was a top-of-the line piece of lethal equipment, in the hands of one of the West’s most lethal men. It was shipped from the Winchester factory on June 19, 1900, and may have been purchased by Horn with the profits from his killing of rustlers -- he charged cattlemen an alleged $600 per man. More than likely, however, the rifle was purchased by members of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, and given to their hired guns, of whom Tom Horn remains the most famous, and the most controversial. While the exterior of the rifle looks to be in excellent condition, the bore exhibits an extreme amount of wear, perhaps due to use after Charles Irwin took possession of it, or perhaps because Tom Horn, like Wild Bill Hickok and other gunfighters, was obsessive about his own shooting practice.

Horn was suspected in the sniper-style murders of rustlers and settlers suspected of cattle stealing throughout the Chugwater River country of Wyoming from 1895 through 1899, when he apparently moved south to the Brown’s Hole region of extreme northern Colorado, an area he knew well from hunting outlaws during his Pinkerton Agency days. Mysterious, sniper-style killings of several cattle rustlers in that area (including Matt Rash and Isam Dart), were attributed to Horn, though never proven. Sometime in early 1901, ill with malaria from his recent volunteer service in the Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War, Horn returned to the Chugwater and recovered at the ranch of his old friend, cattle baron John C. Coble. Horn also picked up his chosen profession of cleaning out rustlers and suspicious nesters by killing and terrorizing them with the constant threat of a bullet from nowhere. Those bullets were almost certainly delivered from his Winchester Model 1894. Whether this rifle was the one used to murder young Willie Nickell, the crime for which Tom Horn was hanged, is a matter that has been debated now for well over a hundred years.

THE STORY OF THE WINCHESTER
MODEL 1894 WINCHESTER

The Winchester Model 1894 was the culmination of lever-gun technology, perhaps the last word on the subject. For a long time after the introduction of the Model 1894 to the West, any lever gun was referred to as a “Winchester” (just as later refrigerators would all be called “Frigidaires,” regardless of the manufacturer). The Model 1894 introduced a series of firsts to the already venerable lever-gun tradition. Most important, it was the first lever gun designed to use cartridges burning “smokeless” powder, a product that had evolved from early experiments with “guncotton,” an explosive created from wood or cotton fibers soaked in nitric and sulfuric acid. Guncotton had been discovered in the 1840s, and had found use as an explosive and propellant in cannons, but it was also unstable. After several factories producing it in Europe exploded with great loss of life, guncotton had been relegated to the pile of promising but impractical inventions. French chemists, and explosives visionaries such as Alfred Nobel in Great Britain, continued to explore the possibility that guncotton could be stabilized enough to be used on the battlefield. By the 1880s such explorations were paying off. French chemists introduced a substance called “Poudre B,” a stabilized version of guncotton, and with it, in 1886, French gunsmiths produced the first military weapon to utilize the new propellant.

The Lebel Model 1886 was a bolt-action rifle firing an 8 millimeter bullet (originally 231 grains, later lightened to 197) at mind-blowing velocities of over 2,300 feet per second, and capable of delivering a lethal blow to an enemy at 4,500 meters. The new smokeless powder produced three times the power of the old black powder, left no burnt residue to foul barrels and bog down moving parts. It left no telltale cloud of smoke to identify a sniper’s nest, or to completely fog a battlefield during massed engagements, which had been one of the major problems of the warfare of previous decades. The invention of smokeless powder was a revolution in firearms technology that allowed the other revolutions -- especially in fully automatic weapons, with their complex mechanisms susceptible to fouling and jamming -- to unfold.

	Since the introduction of the Henry, and then the Winchester Model 1866, westerners had lived, hunted, fought, and died with a Winchester lever gun in their hands.

The .30 Winchester Center Fire (WCF) cartridge that came to dominate American deer hunting (and not a little bit of man hunting) was not Winchester’s first choice for the Model 1894. The rifle was first chambered for the .32–40 and .38–55 black powder cartridges, but these gave way to the .25–35 and the .30–30 (30-caliber bullet pushed by 30 grains of powder) loaded with the new smokeless. In the .30–30, the rifle delivered excellent if not shocking ballistics. The first cartridges were loaded with 160-grain bullets that flew at just shy of 2,000 feet per second. The bullet dropped fast -- almost two feet in 300 yards -- but it was still moving at almost 1,400 feet per second, and carrying around 800 foot pounds of energy, more than enough to kill a man (it is equivalent to being shot point-blank with a Korean War–era M-1 Carbine). By comparison to other weapons of the time, the 1892 issue .30–40 Krag -- the world’s first military-issued, magazine-fed bolt-action rifle -- carried a bit hotter round (with 40 grains of smokeless pushing the .30 caliber bullet), and a heavier (220 grains) bullet. It was chosen for the American campaign against the Spanish in Cuba and the Philippines, once again proving that the military simply was not going to trust the lever guns. But there is little doubt that many of the Rough Riders who volunteered with Theodore Roosevelt to go to Cuba to fight in 1898 -- so many of them westerners, including Tom Horn -- would have preferred the Winchester Model 1894 in .30–30, for its superb handling characteristics, reliability, and most of all, familiarity. Since the introduction of the Henry, and then the Winchester Model 1866, westerners had lived, hunted, fought, and died with a Winchester lever gun in their hands.

For some years the Winchester Company, recognizing that most of their customers could afford only one rifle, and that those customers were overwhelmingly buying the Model 1894 in .30–30, produced a small game load for the rifle, so that a hunter out looking for deer could take rabbits or birds without grave loss of meat or expense. The load came with a 100-grain bullet pushed with only six grains of smokeless powder.

The Model 1894 has been in production for over one hundred years, with almost six hundred thousand rifles, most of them in .30–30 caliber, sold across the world. It holds the honor of being the most successful civilian rifle in history, in constant production for over a century.

CHUGWATER RIVER COUNTRY,
NEAR IRON MOUNTAIN, WYOMING,
SUMMER OF 1895

Nobody could say that there was no warning. The notes had been tacked to the doors of makeshift shacks and dugouts all through the valley of the Chugwater. Stop stealing cattle, leave, or die. Many of the settlers tried to leave the cattle barons’ herds alone, even though it was becoming obvious to them that the land was too high and cold and raw for farming. The wild game was mostly shot-out, and hopes for long-term survival were few. The railroads selling “rain follows the plow” flimflams and the Wyoming land agents showing photos of bumper crops taken in places that were not Wyoming had all lied, and the settlers were stuck. Short-term survival would have to suffice. Sometimes that meant taking down a cow or two in a lonely coulee, or bunching a few and using a “running iron” to change the brands for a quick sale.

William Lewis was one of the settlers that got two notes. He laughed at them both. Lewis never made a pretense of farming as other rustlers in the area had done. He plowed no ground, bought no seed. He lived in a tiny crude cabin and built crude corrals, filled them with cattle and horses roped on the vast open ranges weakly controlled by the local cattle barons. (Cattle rustling was so common at the time that it had its own vocabulary: stealing cows was called “throwing the long rope” and unbranded calves, ripe for the taking, were called “slicks.”) No one seemed to know where Lewis had come from, but he was a man of temper and violence, a man who was always armed and who was described as living without friendship. He had been arrested once for stealing cattle, and had been freed by a jury of men much like himself, hard men, hard up, trying to survive. No matter how much power the Wyoming Stockgrowers Association might hold over the country, a new power had poured in, poor men, settlers, who were not about to hang one of their own, whether they liked him or not.

The deadline for leaving stated in the warning notes had come and gone, a subject of mockery by some of the hard men of the Chugwater.

In the early morning, out by the corrals, the first bullet struck with a thud beside Lewis’s boot, scuffing a divot from the hard-packed earth and raising the tiniest puff of dust. The rifle shot that followed was a clear, short bang, lost so quickly in the immensity of sand rock and dry grassland that Lewis could not tell where it came from.

He mounted his horse and drew his pistol, riding the perimeter of his land, looking for the bushwhacker, or a clue to where he had lain in ambush. There was nothing, not a track, not a spent cartridge. A few days later, a hot and still August midmorning, as he worked to put rails on his corral, another bullet thunked into a fencepost. This time, Lewis had his rifle at hand, and he fired at the empty landscape, selecting spots where a rifleman might be concealed. After some hours searching the country for his assailant, he made a circuit of the neighbors, brandishing the rifle, telling them that he was ready for attack, eager for the fight and the kill of the cowardly assassin that had tried to kill him and couldn’t get the job done. Perhaps Lewis thought that the coming fight would be a chance for vengeance, a chance to strike a blow for the little man, honest or otherwise. It was not impossible; the Wyoming Stockgrowers Association and a band of almost fifty hired killers had taken on the settlers and come out on the losing end of the Johnson County War, in April of 1892, in the Powder River country.

But the time for that kind of conflict was over. The ranchers had learned valuable lessons in the public debacle of the Johnson County War. A new order had come into the barren valley of the Chugwater, one that rode alone by night, lay in silent ambush by day, left no tracks, no sign of its constant watching.

	It is said that a rider in the Chugwater during these years could witness the fruits of Tom Horn’s labors: dugouts stood empty with doors agape, weed-grown cabins abandoned and yawing in the wind, over all hung a desolate silence. The new order seemed to be working out just as the cattlemen had hoped it would.

The warning time was over, too. When William Lewis went out to his corrals early the next morning, a bullet struck him in the center of his sternum and blasted away his heart. He clung to the rails, and a second shot struck him in the side, knocking him to his knees. A third rolled him out flat. Nobody found him for three days. When news of the killing got out, Lewis’s neighbors told reporters that it was a relief to have him dead. The next killing came two weeks later.

Fred Powell’s final note read like this: “Laramie, Wyo., September 2, 1895 Mr. Powell -- this is your third and last warning. There are three things for you to do -- quit killing other people’s cattle or be killed yourself, or leave the country yourself at once.”

Even according to his hired hand, Andy Ross, would-be rancher Fred Powell was “mighty crude in the way he took in cattle.” Powell had lost an arm while working on the railroad, but that had not stopped his career as an unrepentant thief and general malefactor. He brazenly stole horses and cattle, even from neighbors who were as poor as he was. Ross and Powell were cutting willows in a creek bottom about twelve miles from the Lewis cabin, getting ready to build hay racks for the season’s last crop of hay. It was September 10, 1895.

The shot came from far away, Ross said. Powell took the bullet in the chest, and died in the creek bottom.

The killings had an effect on the Chugwater. Settlers who had come to rely on free cattle to help them get by until they could establish farms or ranches of their own left. So did others who were sure that they would be targeted whether they stole cattle or not, just as innocents had been lynched in the Johnson County War. True rustlers left, too, unable to concentrate on catching cattle and using a “running iron” to change their brands. All that work, out in the open, a fire burning to heat the irons, the cattle bawling, dust rising, could not be done with a professional assassin lurking, apparently able to turn up anywhere at any time. It is said that a rider in the Chugwater during these years could witness the fruits of Tom Horn’s labors: dugouts stood empty with doors agape, weed-grown cabins abandoned and yawing in the wind, over all hung a desolate silence.

The new order seemed to be working out just as the cattlemen had hoped it would.

THE STORY OF TOM HORN

Tom Horn was born at the very outset of the Civil War, and came of age in the bitter years of the 1870s, on a small farm in Scotland County, Missouri. In his autobiography, written from his jail cell, he describes leaving home after his faithful dog, Shedrick, was shot dead after having attacked a boy who was beating Horn -- and after one too many severe beatings from his father. He drifted west, worked as a stage driver and mail rider, and, at age sixteen, entered the world of the Apache Wars in Arizona. He was a natural linguist and he learned Spanish and Apache over a matter of months, drawing wages as an interpreter for the army and others. It is said that he spoke German, also, which he may have learned from his mentor among the Apaches, Al Sieber, the German-born “Chief of Scouts” for the army. Sieber was renowned for his honesty, his intelligence, and his brutality.

The Apache Wars would be the refining fire of Horn’s life, taking him into battle from sun-blasted deserts deep in Mexico to the high mountains of Arizona, through a maze of politics and betrayals by Indian agents, soldiers, Apaches, Mexicans, and crooked civilians on both sides of the border. Those years also took him deep into Apache warrior culture, an experience that probably marked him for life. He is said to have been an interpreter at the surrender of Geronimo, and a witness to the tragic mistreatment of the Apaches afterward.

At twenty-seven years old, he had ridden in one of the West’s most challenging campaigns, in some of the world’s most difficult terrain, against some of the world’s fiercest warriors. It was difficult to know what to do next. He had served with men like Al Sieber and the Medal of Honor winner (and medical doctor) Maj. Gen. Leonard Wood, who was called “Old Icebox” for his demeanor in battle. Horn tried mining (in some of the most dangerous Apache country left), but wrote later in his autobiography that, “it was too slow, and I could not stay at it.” He won purses at rodeos and at roping contests, and in April of 1887, he wandered into the Pleasant Valley War, a war of annihilation between the Graham family of cattlemen and the sheepherding Tewksbury family. Horn served as deputy under Yavapai County Sheriff Bucky O’Neil during the feud, and it is believed that he worked as a hired gunman in the war. Horn wrote in his autobiography that he served as “mediator” in the conflict, which he described, in what is probably a clue as to whom he served, as a “war to the knife between cattlemen and rustlers.” He also served as deputy under Apache County Sheriff Commodore Owens, who while attempting to make an arrest for a murder related to the feud, killed four members of the Graham faction in a blistering gunfight that lasted only a few minutes. The Pleasant Valley War ended in 1892 after both families had basically killed each other off.

By then Tom Horn was working for the Pinkerton Agency, as a professional manhunter and tracker. He was dogged and certain in his pursuits, often working undercover, posing as a rustler or drifting cowhand, and riding from Colorado to Indian Territory in Oklahoma and back again, bringing in train robbers and cattle rustlers. In the early spring of 1894, the Pinkertons sent Horn to Wyoming to investigate organized cattle and horse stealing in Colorado and Wyoming, where he first met John Coble and other prominent stockmen of the region. Coble and other ranchers were facing a sea change in the livestock industry. Homesteaders -- the stockmen hated them and called them “nesters” -- were staking claim to the most productive rangelands and creek bottomlands in southern Wyoming and northwest Colorado. They blocked cattle's access to water, and built their farms where the ranchers cut their hay. Many of them were stocking their claims with sheep, which cattlemen were convinced would ruin the land by grazing the earth bare. Furthermore, the homesteaders saw little harm in taking in “stray cattle.” When that tolerant attitude toward thievery led to an influx of professional rustlers to the area, some homesteaders saw that as a positive development, hurting the big ranchers who despised them.

The tolerance for the criminals proved to be an Achilles heel for the settlers, as did the settlers’ habit of serving on juries and turning loose men accused of rustling. The cattlemen, accustomed to being the power, found instead that the legal system was closed to them. Hiring the respected manhunter and their friend, Tom Horn, to post warnings on the doors of cabins in the area, and to murder those who would not be warned, was their solution. The pay was good -- as high as $600 per kill -- and the life was much more free than his employment with the Pinkertons, which Horn had often said that he did not like. (Some reports say that the Pinkerton Agency quietly fired him after he was suspected of a robbery in Nevada.) It is estimated that Horn killed between twenty-five and thirty men during his career as a “stock detective,” all of them shot sniper style, or, in the parlance of the day, “dry-gulched.” The cattlemen needed an “angel of death,” as Horn would come to be called in the accounts of the day, and nobody could have been better for the job.

Restless as always, in 1898, Horn joined up with the Rough Riders to fight and serve as pack master (handling mules) in the Spanish–American War, under the command of Theodore Roosevelt, Maj. Gen. Leonard “Old Icebox” Wood, and Yavapai County Sheriff Bucky O’Neill. It must have felt like a reunion. Hundreds of western plainsmen were heading to Florida to fill the ranks of the wild and illustrious dream army of war-mad Teddy Roosevelt. The outcome of the Rough Riders adventure was a glorious victory in Cuba, but the costs of the expedition were high, over three thousand U.S. soldiers dead of fever or other disease, and another two hundred killed or wounded. Eighty-nine of the Rough Riders fell. Horn, it is believed, never saw combat, falling ill with malaria in Cuba. Bucky O’Neill, exhorting his soldiers at the Battle of Kettle Hill, took a Spanish Mauser round (propelled by the new smokeless powder) in the mouth that blew his brains out the back of his head. His last comment, before he was hit, was that there was no Spanish bullet made that could kill him.

Horn returned to Wyoming from Florida, still weak from fever, and recovered at his friend Coble’s ranch. Whatever his relationship with the Pinkerton Agency, Horn became fascinated with the Union Pacific train robbery that took place on June 2, 1899, and while in pursuit of the robbers (probably in pursuit of the reward for their capture), he took the opportunity to earn some extra cash by killing rustlers in the Brown’s Hole area of northern Colorado (now Brown’s Park National Wildlife Refuge just south of Highway 319).

The train robbers, members of the Wild Bunch, eluded him (although one of the rustlers Horn shot on this trip was loosely connected to the gang). But his work as a hired killer was lucrative. It was during this time that he was alleged to have begun his custom of marking his kills by putting a small rock under the heads of the dead men. The legend may not be true, but it has the ring of truth to it, because Horn’s campaign was to introduce terror to the region, and symbols -- first the notes and then the rocks -- held the power to terrify. Horn would later brag that he had stopped cow stealing in his region in one single year of “work.”

It was the bragging that would bring him down. In the ultraposh saloons of Cheyenne and Denver, where Horn went on multiday sprees, drinking and patronizing the brothels with the money he made, he liked to talk. He bragged to adoring audiences of three-hundred-yard kills, of multiple shots made very fast, of the terror he brought to the nesters and their ilk on behalf of his friends, powerful and important men of industry, all of them. Out of money, and sober again, he rode away from these modern, gas-lit cities and into the plains, and went back on the hunt, silent, living on almost nothing, sleeping cold, waiting for the kill, just as he had been doing almost his entire life.

In 1900, while working for John Coble, Horn found what was probably the first girlfriend of his life. In his wanderings over the ranges, he often spent the night with the Miller family, a rough-and-tumble outfit building a ranch near Iron Mountain. The Millers were friends with Coble, and they provided the board for the schoolteacher of the Iron Mountain School, a Missouri-born woman named Glendolene Kimmell, who had come to the West, she would say later, out of an affinity for adventure and the frontier type. She complained that most of the men she encountered in Wyoming were little different than the field and factory hands she had known in the East. When Tom Horn drifted in to the Miller Ranch, she recognized an altogether different breed.

Horn was forty-one, Kimmell, twenty-two. From her later writings it was clear that her sympathies lay with the powerful cattlemen and with the wild and romantic figure of Tom Horn rather than with the nesters and homesteaders who were crowding the land. She was also fearless in her own way -- many people warned her away from her job at the Iron Mountain School because it was at the center of a decade-long blood feud between the Millers and the Nickell family, a clan of Kentuckian homesteaders who had settled on North Chugwater Creek. The patriarch of the family, Kels Nickell, was a veteran of the Plains Indian Wars, a man who had watched his own father murdered by guerillas in the last days of the Civil War. Kels was a hard-bitten man who refused to be pushed at all. Almost as if to spite his neighbors, Nickell ran sheep on his homestead and on the land he was purchasing. His temper was locally feared, and rightly so: In an 1890 dispute over grazing on John Coble’s land, Kels Nickell pulled a knife and badly wounded Coble. Both families in the feud, like most people in the Chugwater at this time, went armed at all times.

It was clear that someone was going to be killed. Descendants of the Nickells say that on July 10, 1901, a threatening note was left on the Nickell’s gate. Kels Nickell did not scoff at the note. But he did not consider leaving the ranch he had built up to relative prosperity over sixteen years of backbreaking toil, either. Everybody in the country knew what had happened to Rash and Dart, but those men were professional criminals. Kels did not believe that anybody would try to kill a father of eight young children who owned his own section of land, just because he was a sheepman with few friends. He was wrong.

Eight days later, Willie Nickell rode out early, on his father’s horse, to meet a new hired hand at the railroad stop. The morning was chilly, and he wore his father’s coat and hat. The boy dismounted to open a gap gate and lead his horse through. Two bullets from a .30–30 hit him in the back, exiting his chest in a spray of blood that spattered and stained the gatepost. He turned for home, walked a few yards, and died.

While the family was grieving for Willie, somebody shot Kels three times with a rifle, from afar, while he was working in his field. The tough old Scotch-Irish pioneer survived, but his arm was shattered, and he would never be the same. While he was in the hospital in Cheyenne, a group of masked riders attacked his sheep herd, running off the new herder and killing many of the animals. The Nickells family, broken at last, would leave their ranch, and take up residence in Cheyenne.

Wyoming had endured almost twenty years of cold and hot range wars between settlers, sheepmen, and big cattle interests. The people were tired of it. The murder of Willie Nickell, far more than the shooting of his father, was written about with outrage in all the major newspapers, and the story became a rallying point for both rage and change. The century had turned, Cheyenne was a burgeoning modern city, and while Tom Horn might be a kind of frontier hero in the saloons, the real Tom Horn was dragging the murderous baggage of the nineteenth century into the industrious and “orderly” twentieth.

He would always say that he never shot Willie Nickell. He testified at the inquest into the boy’s killing and seemed sincere in his denial of it; his alibi that he was riding the range about nine miles away was believable. Everybody knew about the Nickell-Miller feud, and knew that Tom Horn was not the only “angel of death” riding the Chugwater country. Horn continued to date Glendolene Kimmell, and to travel widely, to rodeos in Denver, and he went on longer and longer sprees, to cities as far away as Omaha. In Denver, drunk in a bar at four in the morning, he picked a fight with a professional boxer, who broke his jaw and laid him up for three weeks. Sometime during this spree, a drunken Horn also allegedly told saloon patrons that he killed Willie Nickell.

	The century had turned, Cheyenne was a burgeoning modern city, and while Tom Horn might be a kind of frontier hero in the saloons, the real Tom Horn was dragging the murderous baggage of the nineteenth century into the industrious and “orderly” twentieth.

Deputy U.S. Marshal Joe LeFors had known Tom Horn for years. LeFors had also ridden for the Pinkertons, had chased the Wild Bunch, had been a stock detective, though never a hired killer. He was a strange man, with little of the luster of Tom Horn. LeFors was convinced that Horn had killed Willie Nickell, or he was at least convinced that Horn could be convicted of the crime, given his history, reputation, and the fury of the settlers. Taking a cue, perhaps, from Horn’s own undercover work, LeFors invented a job in eastern Montana, infiltrating a gang of outlaws who posed as wolfers. LeFors told Horn that he had been asked to find an expert manhunter for a group of wealthy cattlemen who wanted the outlaws killed, and would pay handsomely for the right man. Horn leapt at the chance to go north on such a hunt, just as LeFors knew he would. The two men met in Cheyenne, and Horn, desperate for the fictitious job, began regaling LeFors with tales of his prowess as a stock detective and hired killer. There was plenty of drinking going on, and hidden in a side room was a deputy sheriff and a stenographer. LeFors guided the conversation carefully beyond the issue of the Montana job, and to the Willie Nickel murder. According to the transcript of the conversation, Horn admitted to killing Nickell with his Winchester 1894 .30–30, and walking barefoot to the body to check his shooting, and taking away the spent cartridges. Horn was arrested on January 13, 1902, and charged with the murder.

His friend John Coble paid for his defense. Glendolene Kimmell testified that she was certain that the teenaged Victor Miller had killed Willie Nickell and shot Kels. The drunken confession was widely discredited, though not enough to save Tom Horn. The jury found him guilty. Several of the jurors had known Horn for years. They told newspaper reporters that they liked him, but that the evidence against him was too strong.

While awaiting his appeal, Horn and a fellow inmate overpowered their guard, and fled into the streets of Cheyenne. Horn was recaptured when he could not figure out how to take off the safety of the pistol he had taken, a mistake that saved the life of O. M. Eldrich, a citizen who was chasing him. Eldrich, seeing that Horn could not get the pistol to fire, attacked him and beat him with his own weapon. A crowd took him back to the jail. He spent his days braiding a horsehair rope, writing letters (one to the stenographer, an eloquent plea for him to reconsider his deadly forgery), and hoping for escape or clemency.

Dynamite was found buried in the snow beside the jailhouse walls, an apparent attempt by friends to free him.

Tom Horn went to the gallows on November 20, 1903. He had invited some of his friends to witness his death. Charles Irwin and his brother Frank, at Horn’s request, sang a tearful duet of “Life Is Like a Mountain Railroad” as Horn mounted the gallows. Outside the courthouse a crowd of hundreds had gathered to witness the historic death march of one of the West’s last heroes, or one of its last untamed men. The crowd included many friends of Tom Horn and was closely watched by a detachment of soldiers. A Gatling gun, manned by an experienced army machinegunner, was mounted on the roof of the courthouse to discourage any mass attempts to free the condemned man. By the time the hymn was finished, Horn had already helped hangman Joseph Cahill secure the harness and straps around his own body. “You ain’t losing your nerve, are you, Joe?” Horn asked Cahill. When the experimental, automated trap turned loose, dropping Tom Horn to a blue-faced death, one of the Old West’s most interesting adventurers and killers was gone. He was one day shy of being forty-three years old.

[End of article]