homework america history 2

Cowboys have long been synonymous with the United States. That fact is ironic given that the first cowboys on the North American continent were not Anglo-Americans but actually Spanish-speaking men known as vaqueros. The word cowboy itself refers to a person who tends cattle. And cattle-raising was first introduced in what is now known as Texas by the Catholic priests who founded the Spanish missions back in the day. Much later, some of the Anglo settlers continued the venerable tradition of raising cattle and Texas, in particular, has been known for that industry ever since.

Since cowboys tend cattle, they typically work on ranches. However, as the population of the U.S. expanded exponentially after the Civil War, consumer demand for beef throughout the country created a new job for cowboys: leading cattle drives from Texas to the major railroad hubs of Kansas and other Great Plains states hundreds of miles to the north. The following map shows the most famous trails that cowboys followed as they drove their cattle from Texas to the Plains states:

As you can see from the map, the Chisholm Trail ran through Fort Worth while the Shawnee Trail went through Dallas.

Driving cattle was very hard work and not for the faint of heart. There was nothing glamorous about the job and it tended to attract only strong, young, single men: a typical cattle drive could last for several months and the rigors and loneliness of the trail were not really meant for family men. Here's a painting showing some cowboys on one of the old trails:

Given that the job obviously wasn't for everyone, it's not surprising that Cowboys developed their own unique culture with an unwritten code of conduct that they enforced themselves while on the trails. It was a solitary lifestyle to a great extent but those who followed the "Cowboy Code" still enjoyed a distinctive form of camaraderie, as shown here in this depiction of cattle drivers enjoying an evening meal around the chuck wagon:

And here is a vintage photo of a group of real-life cowboys from back in the 1880s:

Now, these guys aren't exactly dressed in fashions that you'll find today at your friendly neighborhood "Western Wear" store but you can see where such styles originated. Their hats were definitely broad-brimmed but otherwise bear only a slight resemblance to the modern-day "cowboy hat." But how about those moustaches that some of them sported? Vintage cool, for sure.

Anyway, the "Golden Age of the American Cowboy" didn't really last all that long as the marathon cattle drives that were so common and provided gainful employment for many cowboys during the 1860s and 1870s came to a crashing halt by the middle of the 1880s while the need for cowboy labor on ranches also diminished by then. There were three main reasons why this happened and I'll discuss them one-by-one.

The first was the invention of barbed wire, which was then used, naturally, to make barbed-wire fences that soon sprang up all across the American West. This is a photo of Joseph Glidden, the man who invented barbed wire:

Right after Mr. Glidden invented barbed wire, he went down to his local tattoo parlor and got the world's first-ever barbed wire tattoo on his right upper arm. (That's a joke, son; please don't list that as an item on your List of Five Facts on the next Exam, as students of mine have actually done in the past!)

Barbed-wire fences served several useful functions on the typical ranch. First, they enabled ranchers to clearly mark-off the boundary lines of their property. There's an old saying that "good fences make good neighbors." Well, if that's true then barbed-wire fences make really good neighbors. Property disputes between neighboring landowners lessened in frequency and intensity once barbed-wire fences went up on ranches.

Those same fences also kept a rancher's horses and cattle from roaming off the property. And while keeping livestock in, the fences also kept horse-thieves and cattle-rustlers out. As a result, ranchers didn't need to hire so many cowboys to live and work on their property in order to ward off prospective thieves and keep horses and cattle from wandering. There was still some need for cowboy-laborers on ranches, of course, just not as much as before, all thanks to the invention of barbed-wire fencing. Meanwhile, barbed-wire fences also hampered the ability of cowboys leading cattle drives to find open-range land to graze their stocks while on the trail.

Besides the invention of barbed wire fences, the great cattle drives gradually died out due to two other inter-related developments. The first was the expansion of railroads into Texas on a large scale. Why hire cowboys to drive cattle hundreds of miles to Kansas, for example, when you could simply load your cattle on a train and get them there much faster and with less risk. The second development that killed off the cattle drives was the invention of the refrigerated railroad car, which enabled the beef from slaughtered cattle to be transported to more distant markets while still remaining fresh. With refrigerated railroad cars, livestock could be slaughtered virtually anywhere and, sure enough, by the early 1900s, the Fort Worth Stockyards had become the fifth biggest livestock processing market in the country.

So, in sum, three major factors contributed to the demise of the American Cowboy: 1) the invention of barbed wire; 2) the expansion of railroad lines into the state; and 3) the invention of the refrigerated railroad car. While cowboys still work on American ranches today, naturally, and will continue to do so in the future (I'd like to see a robot brand a steer!), there may only be a few thousand truly professional cowboys left in America today whereas some historians estimate that there were up to 40,000 working cowboys nationwide in the days of the Old West.

Legends of the Wild West

The Wild West Era in the United States lasted from approximately 1865 to the early 1900s as the nation's entire western frontier was eventually "settled" and "civilized" by American citizens. The key factor allowing such settlement, as I previously discussed, was the subjugation of the Native American Indian tribes, who were all eventually moved onto reservations --- by violent force at times.

And yet, parts of the West remained violent even after the Indians were taken out of the picture. White outlaws and gunslingers began to populate the region along with more peaceful settlers, thus making the West "wild." I will now proceed to discuss some of the legendary figures of the Wild West but, as I do so, you should bear in mind that it's very difficult to separate fact from fiction and true stories from myths when it comes to the lives of these crazy characters. But since this is a history course, I'll try to stick to the facts as best I can.

Another important point that you should remember as I introduce these characters to you is that Americans in general have always had a weird fascination with outlaws. And some Americans go beyond being merely fascinated with outlaws and wind up romanticizing and glorifying them. This phenomenon seemed to start with the gunslingers of the Wild West in the 19th Century but it resurfaced in the 20th Century when Americans became enamored with the bootlegging gangsters of the Prohibition Era followed by the Mafiosos during the Golden Age of the Italian-American Mafia. Later yet came the outlaw bikers and, later still, the modern-day, inner-city "gangstas." The common thread amongst all these outlaw groups is that many Americans who have nothing to do with them in real life are still very interested in following their escapades and fascinated by their lifestyles.

Why is that? Why are Americans so fascinated by outlaw-types? Most Americans are decent, peaceful, law-abiding citizens while outlaws are people --- as the very word outlaw implies --- who operate outside the law and who violate social norms as a way of life. Some historians suggest that Americans dig outlaws because the United States itself was founded by a group of rebels who staged a violent and successful revolution against their mother country of England. Well, I don't know if you can trace Americans' ongoing fascination with outlaws all the way back to the American Revolution but, in all honesty, I have no explanation of my own for the phenomenon. All I know is that it's real and undeniable, just like the love-hate attitude about Indians that I discussed in the last set of Notes. But let's proceed to a discussion of some Wild West outlaws as I promised.

Wild Bill Hickok

In the days of the Wild West, it wasn't always easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys. Part of the reason for that is the fact that law enforcement wasn't viewed back then as a professional occupation or career choice like it is today. Men who assumed the duties of law enforcement in the Wild West did so temporarily, for the most part, and it wasn't unusual for a given man to fluctuate between wearing a badge and enforcing the law at certain times while breaking the law at other times while not wearing a badge.

Wild Bill Hickok was one of those men who tended to straddle the line between enforcing the law and breaking it. After serving as a scout and spy for the Union Army in the Civil War, Hickok killed a man in a dispute over a woman and later emerged the victor in what may have been America's first quick-draw duel, held in Springfield, Missouri. In the process, he developed a reputation as a deadly gunslinger, which, ironically, led a couple of towns in Kansas to hire him as their marshal. After all, if a lawman is going to get into gunfights with outlaws, you want the lawman to come out the winner! Here's a picture of Wild Bill:

Hickok later gave up the badge and went to work for Buffalo Bill Cody as a sharpshooter in some of Cody's early Wild West shows. Here we see a publicity photo from one of those shows with Wild Bill pictured second from the left and a young Buffalo Bill in the middle:

Unfortunately, Hickok's eyesight began to fail him as he aged and his sharpshooting skills deteriorated as a result. He thus had to leave Buffalo Bill's show and became a drifter and a gambler. While playing poker one night in 1876 at a saloon in what is now Deadwood, South Dakota, he was shot in the back of the head and killed by a young man who'd lost a lot of money playing poker with Wild Bill the night before. Poor Wild Bill didn't stand a chance: he was seated at the table with his back to the door and never saw his killer before being murdered. Hickok's death at the poker table with his back to the door led to a couple of enduring American legacies: 1) people with enemies who may be out to get them never sit with their backs to the door in public establishments; and 2) Wild Bill was holding two pair in his hand when he was killed, specifically, a pair of aces and a pair of eights with all four cards being black; ever since then, that combination has been known amongst poker players as the "Dead Man's Hand."

Billy the Kid

Billy the Kid grew up without a father and took to crime at an early age, stealing horses and cattle in the New Mexico Territory. Later, he took sides in the so-called Lincoln County War, in which two cattle barons battled each other for control of a New Mexico county. During that "war," Billy took part in the killing of a sheriff, for which he was later convicted and sentenced to death. However, while awaiting execution, he managed to kill two guards and escaped from his jail cell. Here's the only picture ever taken of Billy the Kid:

After Billy escaped from jail, Sheriff Pat Garrett was determined to hunt him down. Here's a picture of Garrett:

Garrett discovered that Billy was staying in a ranch house and he went there intending to kill him on the spot. When Billy heard someone enter the house, he uttered his famous, final words: "Quien es?" (Remember, this was in New Mexico and Billy was a bilingual outlaw.) The answer to Billy's question came in the form of a gun blast as Garrett shot him dead.

Billy the Kid may have only been 20 or 21-years old when Sheriff Garrett killed him. We don't know how old he was when he died because we don't know for sure, given the impoverished nature of his youth, when he was born. But it's estimated that he may have killed as many as 21 men during his short life. While Billy had earned quite a reputation while he was alive, he assumed mythic status after his death. Even to this day, he has his admirers who contend that he really wasn't such a bad guy but, rather, a poor kid who came from a dysfunctional family and just couldn't catch a break in life. Here's where he's supposedly buried (there's a dispute about that) in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, along with two of his gang members:

And here's a close-up of the marker at his supposed grave:

As you may or may not be able to see, there's crossed pistols at the top of the memorial stone, beneath which are 21 notches for the 21 men he supposedly killed. The inscription at the bottom reads, in part, "The Boy Bandit King," and "He Died as He had Lived." The cage around the purported gravesite is intended to keep vandals and souvenir-hunters from doing any damage.

Not long ago, Billy's fans petitioned the Governor of New Mexico to posthumously pardon Billy for his old murder conviction of the sheriff but the request was denied. Yet it seems that he will always have his supporters and defenders.

Jesse James

Jesse James was born into a slave-holding family in Missouri before the Civil War. During that war, Missouri was bitterly divided state between those who favored slavery and those that opposed it. Though slavery remained legal in Missouri, the state chose to stay in the Union. But Jesse James, then a teenager, joined a group of Confederate guerilla fighters who committed atrocities against Union soldiers.

After the war, Jesse and his brother Frank formed the James Gang, which successfully robbed numerous banks, trains, and stagecoaches. Here's Jesse, Frank, and a couple of their gang members:

The James Gang got away with their crimes because they were protected by the many former Confederates who lived in Missouri. In fact, the gang rarely tried to cover up their crimes but, instead, took public credit for them. Jesse was even portrayed as a modern-day Robin Hood though there's no proof that he ever gave any money he stole to the poor. But he certainly loved publicity, which is why we have so many photos of him today, like this one:

And this one:

Flushed with success, the James Gang went up to Minnesota to rob a bank there but that attempt ended in disaster and only Jesse and Frank were able to escape the scene without being killed or captured. The two James brothers hid out in Tennessee for a while, living under assumed names, until they finally moved back to Missouri. At that point, Frank James decided to retire from his life of crime but Jesse formed a new gang and went back to committing robberies. Finally, the Governor of Missouri put a large bounty on Jesse's head and one of his new gang members decided to cash in on that offer. The turn-coat gang member's name was Robert Ford and he killed Jesse by shooting him in the back of the head while Jesse was either hanging or straightening a painting in his house in 1882. Here's Jesse in his casket:

And here's a photo of Robert Ford holding the gun he used to kill Jesse James:

The above photo was used for publicity purposes: after killing Jesse James, Ford toured the country recreating the murder in a stage show! But he could never live down the nickname he was given after shooting his own gang leader in the back of the head: "The Coward." Eventually, Ford left the entertainment field and moved to Colorado, where he owned and operated saloons. And, fittingly, ten years after Ford killed Jesse James, a man walked into a saloon that Ford owned and blew him away with a shotgun after greeting him with a friendly, "Hello, Bob."

Jesse James still has defenders and followers today, with most of them being neo-Confederate sympathizers.

Wyatt Earp

Wyatt Earp was one of those legendary Wild West figures who straddled the line between enforcing and breaking the law. A miner and a gambler in his youth, Wyatt eventually became the town marshal in the violent city of Dodge City, Kansas, where he worked a second job as a card dealer at the infamous Long Branch Saloon. Here's a photo of Wyatt in his glory days:

And here's a photo of his brother, Virgil Earp:

And here's a picture of another Earp brother, Morgan:

As you can see, the Earp brothers loved their moustaches! So too did a gentleman named Doc Holliday, pictured here:

Doc Holliday was a dentist who had to give up his practice when he came down with tuberculosis. Back then, TB was a fatal disease and so Doc knew that his days on Earth were numbered. Seeking adventure before his clock ran out, Holliday joined up with his friends, the Earp brothers, when they all moved to Tombstone, Arizona, a silver mining "boom town." There, Virgil became the town marshal and wound up in a feud with the Clanton Gang.

On October 26, 1881, the Earp brothers and their buddy Doc Holliday faced off against the Clanton Gang in what became known as the Shootout at the O.K. Corral. The gunfight lasted for less than a minute but it took the lives of three members of the Clanton gang, pictured here in their caskets:

(I would tell you the names of these three men except for the fact that our high school football coach used to always say that, "nobody remembers losers," so I guess I won't.)

Several Hollywood movies have been made about the Shootout at the O.K. Corral and the gunfight is regularly recreated for the benefit of tourists today, as we see here:

In the aftermath of that legendary showdown, Morgan Earp was killed in retaliation by surviving members of the Clanton Gang, which prompted Wyatt and his remaining brothers to track down and kill Morgan's four suspected killers. That led to Wyatt being wanted on murder charges and so the brothers broke up and Wyatt and his wife fled first to Colorado, then to Idaho, then to San Diego and, finally, to Alaska, where Mr. and Mrs. Earp made a fortune operating a saloon during the big gold rush of the 1890s. Later Wyatt and his wife moved to California, where they made good money in prospecting and real estate.

Wyatt was one of the most famous survivors of the Wild West and, in his later years, as you can see from this photo, he looked more like a respectable businessman than an old gunslinger:

Wyatt Earp lived long enough to see the advent of motion pictures and, when he died in 1929, several Western movie stars served as his pallbearers.

Bat Masterson

Like Wyatt Earp, Bar Masterson was a legendary Wild West gunslinger who survived those violent days and lived to recreate himself late in life in a most surprising fashion. In his youth, Masterson was an Army scout and a buffalo hunter before becoming a sheriff and a U.S. Marshal in Kansas. Here we see him in his Wild West days:

Bat eventually left law enforcement and wandered about the West, holding down a variety of jobs. For a while, he helped Wyatt Earp run a saloon in Tombstone and later helped manage the original White Elephant saloon in Fort Worth, of all places! As time went on, Bat became heavily involved in gambling ventures and also promoted boxing matches. He finally left the West for good and moved all the way east to New York City, where, rather bizarrely, this once-famous lawman of the Wild West became a sports columnist for a local newspaper!

Here we see him in the Big Apple during his later years, looking nothing like the mythical sheriff of Western lore:

On October 25, 1921, Bat Masterson sat down at his typewriter in the offices of The New York Morning Telegraph to write his column. It started out this like:

"There are those who argue that everything breaks

even in this old dump of a world of ours. I suppose

these ginks who argue that way hold that because

the rich man gets ice in the summer and the poor man

gets it in the winter, things are breaking even for both.

Maybe so, but I'll swear I can't see it that way."

As soon as he typed those words, Bat Masterson, the legendary lawman of the Wild West, collapsed on his desk of a fatal heart attack at the age of 67. He was later immortalized in 108 episodes of the Bat Masterson TV series, which NBC aired from 1958 to 1961. Bat was played on that show by one of my favorite actors, the late Gene Barry, shown here in a publicity photo for the TV show:

(While this photo is in color, I should warn those of you youngsters who may be taking this course that the TV show was in black-and-white, in case you wanted to check out some old episodes but have a fundamental aversion to watching old TV shows or movies that aren't in color. I know who you people are and I pity you. You don't know what you're missing. By the way, Gene Barry later starred in one of the greatest TV series of all time, the original Burke's Law, from 1963-1965. And, yes, it was filmed in black-and-white as well. So, y'all just need to learn to live with it and learn to love it. And that's the end of my Angry Old Man Rant but you still need to get the hell off my lawn!)

John Wesley Hardin

One of the most murderous and infamous gunslingers of the Wild West was John Wesley Hardin. Born in Bonham, Texas in 1853, Hardin's life of violence started when he stabbed a classmate at the age of 14. A year later, he killed a former slave that he'd been arguing and wrestling with. This was during Reconstruction in Texas and Hardin was wholeheartedly against Reconstruction. He hated blacks, Mexicans, and Indians and would later claim to have killed a representative assortment of members of all three of those groups.

While still a teenager, Hardin worked on a cattle drive that ended in Abilene, Kansas, where he purportedly shot and killed a man who was snoring too loudly in a hotel room next to his. Fleeing back to Texas, Hardin's violent ways continued and he got involved in a longstanding and murderous feud between two families. Again, it's hard to separate fact from fiction when historians study the lives of such Wild West figures as Hardin but he reportedly killed anywhere from 20 to 40 men before reaching the age of 21. And, indeed, while celebrating his 21st birthday in a saloon in Comanche, Texas, on May 26, 1874, he shot and killed a popular deputy sheriff. While Hardin escaped from the scene, his brother and two of his cousins were lynched by an angry mob in the aftermath. Here's a picture of Hardin:

After killing the deputy sheriff, Hardin fled to the Gulf Coast region of Florida and South Alabama where he lived under an assumed name. But authorities were determined to capture him, as we see here on this "Wanted" poster:

As a result of some crack detective work, the Texas Rangers tracked Hardin down and arrested him in Pensacola, Florida in August of 1877 --- three years after he had killed the deputy. Hardin was convicted of that crime and sentenced to serve 25 years in prison in Huntsville, Texas. While imprisoned, Hardin studied the law and was released after serving 16 years of his sentence for good behavior and, in 1894, he received a full pardon from the governor. Hardin then became a licensed Texas attorney! (This I don't understand. When I moved from Michigan to Texas it took me nearly two years to get a license to practice law in Texas and I've never killed anybody!)

Hardin initially practiced law in Gonzales County but he later moved to El Paso, where he seemed to spend more time drinking and gambling in the saloons there than in the local courthouse. He took a mistress in El Paso and got into a feud with a local law enforcement officer and his father, who was a constable. On August 19, 1895, that constable walked into the Acme Saloon and shot Hardin in the back of his head while he was shooting craps and then pumped a few more bullets into him for good measure. Here we see a photo of Hardin's corpse:

Hardin had actually written an autobiography before he was killed but it wasn't published until after his death. In it, he claimed that he "never killed anyone who didn't need killing." But that claim is universally dismissed by historians along with just about everything else he wrote in that book.

Because of the strange fascination that Americans have always for outlaws, memorabilia associated with particularly infamous ones is in great demand. Here we see the Colt revolver that Hardin was carrying when he was killed, along with one of his "Attorney at Law" business cards from El Paso:

By the way, that gun was once auctioned off for $168,000. And his business cards routinely sell for over $1,000 apiece when they go to auction.

Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, and the Wild Bunch

Speaking of the weird fascination that Americans have with outlaw types, here's a picture of Sundance Square, the entertainment district in downtown Fort Worth:

Sundance Square is named after Harry Longabaugh, whose nickname was the "Sundance Kid." He was part of a gang of highly successful professional robbers from Wild West days known as the Wild Bunch. The Sundance Kid had a girlfriend named Etta Place. Here we see a picture of the two of them:

There's a bed-and-breakfast inn called "Etta's Place" in downtown Fort Worth that's named after Etta Place, as we see here:

Also, in downtown Fort Worth, you'll find the Cassidy Building, pictured here:

The Cassidy Building is named after Butch Cassidy, who also belonged to the Wild Bunch. So why were so many things in downtown Fort Worth named after people associated with the Wild Bunch? Well, in November of 1900, five members of that gang came to Fort Worth, where they had never committed any crimes, to hide out from authorities who were looking for them in other parts of the country where they had committed several crimes, the last one being a bank robbery in Nevada in September of 1900.

The Wild Bunch spent several weeks in Fort Worth, living off their ill-gotten gains and partying down in Hell's Half Acre, a notorious "red-light" district in the southern part of downtown. On November 21, 1900, the outlaws decided to get dressed up and have their picture taken at a downtown photography studio. And here is the famous photo taken that day of those outlaws, which would later cause them to become known as the "Fort Worth Five":

In this photo, the Sundance Kid is seated on the far left while his buddy, Butch Cassidy is seated on the far right. The Wild Bunch (Fort Worth Five) would later leave Fort Worth but the photographer put the picture he'd taken of them on display in his studio where a Fort Worth police detective noticed it and recognized a couple of the outlaws in the portrait. The photo was then sent all over the country to police departments, private detective agencies, and newspapers that published it for all their readers to see. It wasn't long before three of the men in the photo were apprehended while Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, with Etta in tow, decided to flee the country, hopping on a boat that took them to South America.

What happened to Butch and Sundance after they arrived in South America remains somewhat of a mystery; it does appear that Etta returned to the States at some point. Some historians believe that Butch and Sundance became legitimate ranchers in Argentina for at least a while but most historians are convinced that the duo went back to a life of crime and wound up being shot dead in a shootout with soldiers who hunted them down in Bolivia. There are also rumors that the two were never killed in South America but actually returned separately to the U.S. where they lived out their years in anonymity. Once again, it's really hard to separate the truth from myths and legends when it comes to so many of these famous Wild West characters.

Judge Roy Bean

Roy Bean was originally from Kentucky but he moved to Mexico as a young man with one of his older brothers only to have to flee to California after getting in trouble south of the border. In fact, Bean constantly got in trouble in his younger years, including in California, where another one of his brothers was murdered and Bean himself was nearly hanged.

He moved next to New Mexico where he helped smuggle goods to the Confederate Army during the Civil War. After the war, he moved to San Antonio where he married a Tejano teenager and had four children with her. However, Bean supported his family through questionable means. To give just one example, he used to sell watered-down milk to unsuspecting customers. When one such customer complained about finding minnows in his milk, Bean said that he would try to stop his cows from drinking out of the creek in the future!

In the 1880s, Bean left his wife and children behind and set up a tent saloon in West Texas where railroad tracks were being laid. In a desolate area between the Pecos River and the Rio Grande, Bean volunteered to serve as the area's justice of the peace despite having no legal education whatsoever. (Amazingly, even today in Texas, a person can be elected or appointed as a justice of the peace without having earned a law degree!) He eventually built a combination saloon-courthouse in Langtry, Texas, that he named the Jersey Lilly after Lillie Langtry, a popular British singer that Bean had a crush on. Here's a picture of the beautiful Ms. Langtry:

And here's a photo of Judge Roy Bean sitting on the front porch of his saloon-courthouse:

And here's another photo of Judge Bean standing with some locals in front of the Jersey Lilly:

And here is a portrait of Judge Bean holding the only law book he owned, an outdated compendium of Texas state laws:

Without any legal knowledge, Judge Bean issued rulings on the fly with many of them being rather unorthodox. When a cowboy's dead body was found with a pistol and $40 on him, Bean fined the dead man the $40 left on his body and used it to pay for the man's funeral while keeping the gun for himself! Since there wasn't a jail in town, Bean would force men he had convicted of crimes to perform useful work in the area for free in an early version of what we call today "community service." While Bean is alleged to have illegally kept some of the fines that he collected in his court for himself, he also used some of that money to anonymously provide various necessities to poor residents of his city. So, he did have a heart.

But operating as a judge in the middle of nowhere without a police force to support him, Bean sometimes did what he thought he had to do to survive. For example, when an Irish railroad worker was charged with murdering a Chinese railroad worker, Bean presided over the trial while dozens of the defendant's angry Irish friends stood outside the courtroom in an effort to intimidate Bean. The intimidation worked. When it came time for Bean to rule on the Irishman's guilt, he solemnly pronounced, after thumbing through his only law book, that while "homicide is the killing of a man, I can find no law in this book against killing a Chinaman." He then dismissed the case and released the Irish murderer into the hands of his friends.

In 1896, Bean became nationally famous for promoting a World Heavyweight Title boxing match along with Bat Masterson. Since boxing was illegal in Texas at the time, Bean set up a ring on a sandbar on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande and arranged for reporters and spectators to travel from El Paso to watch the bout and then welcomed them back to his saloon afterwards to purchase drinks. Here we see a photo of that bizarre boxing bout:

And here we see an historical marker located near where the fight took place.

While the boxing match brought Judge Bean national renown, his real ambition in life was to somehow get his British singer-crush, Lillie Langtry, to visit him in Texas. He kept writing her love letters in which he lied to her, telling her that he had named the City of Langtry after her! But it was not to be. On March 16, 1903, Bean went on a drinking binge, which was a common practice for him, but this last one proved too much for his nearly 80-year old body and he died. Interestingly, Lillie Langtry actually did stop in Langtry, Texas on a U.S. tour several months after he died while she was travelling from New Orleans to Los Angeles. The local townspeople regaled her with stories about the late judge, prompting Ms. Langtry to later reflect that "it was a short visit but an unforgettable one."

Judge Roy Bean will be never be forgotten in Langtry, Texas, where his courtroom-saloon has been preserved for the benefit of tourists, as we see here:

And here's a view from the inside:

There's also a nearby tourist center where the legend of Judge Roy Bean is kept alive by the fine citizens of Langtry. By the way, here's where Langtry is on a map:

As you can see, Langtry is not exactly a quick trip from Fort Worth but if you ever go there to visit Judge Bean's old courthouse, I'm sure you'll be welcomed with open arms: the population of Langtry has dipped down into the double digits in recent years and they could sure use the revenue!

Or maybe you'd just like to stay close to home and honor Judge Bean's memory by going to Six Flags Over Texas in Arlington and riding the "Judge Roy Scream" rollercoaster:

Well, dear students, that's it for the Second Exam, which will be a Wild West Special! I'm taking it easy on y'all again and I hope you appreciate it. Please submit your Answer Document by 11:59 p.m. on Wednesday, October 14, to this email address: [email protected].

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