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How Lawless were the Cowtowns? The Case of Abilene
For Jim Hoy, in his book: Gathering Strays – Stories from Kansas and the Southwestern Plains (2023), Abilene is the "prototype of the Cow Town … on one side of the railroad tracks are the stockyards, the saloons, the gambling houses, and the dance halls, and on the other side are the homes of the respectable citizens". Indeed, in August 1871, the Topeka Record commented: "Abilene is divided by the railroad into two sections . . . The north side is literary, religious and commercial, and possesses … the churches, the banks, and several large stores of various description; the south side of the road is the Abilene of ‘story and song’, and possesses the large hotels, the saloons, and the places where the ‘dealers in cardboard, bone and ivory’ most do congregate. When you are on the north side of the track you are in Kansas, and hear sober and profitable conversation on the subject of the weather, the price of land and the crops; when you cross to the south side you are in Texas."
THE STEREOTYPE OF THE COWTOWN Abilene before McCoy consisted of a stage-coach way-station called ‘The Hotel’, a general merchandise store-cum-post office, ‘Old Man Jones’s saloon’, and a dozen log houses with sod roofs. In 1866, however, the first ‘long drive’ to Sedalia, Missouri, carried Texas Fever to the local cattle, and was thereafter banned from Missouri. Looking for an alternative railhead, therefore, and refused by Salina and Junction City, in 1867 Illinois stockman Joseph McCoy built stock pens south-west of Abilene, plus a large hotel called ‘Drovers’ Cottage’. Over the next five years more than a million head of cattle were shipped out of the town. Hoy takes up the story: "The cattle trade brought many new settlers to Abilene, and many saloons, gambling dens, and dance halls. Whereas the town originally had only twelve houses, it soon had almost three times that many saloons. And lots of noise. The young drovers, after three or four celibate months on the dusty trail with only themselves for company, really let loose when they hit town with all its diversions. "I was surprised when I learned some time back that for its first three years as a cow town Abilene had no official law. Saloonkeepers kept order, such as it was; excessive violence, after all, was bad for business. As the cattle trade grew, however, so did the town and so did the numbers of cowboys looking for a good time. As historian Wayne Lee put it, there was no law in ‘Texas’ Abilene (not to be confused with Abilene, Texas), which was no problem so long as the cowboys stayed in the rowdy district. But when they invaded Kansas Abilene with their whooping and hollering, shooting up posters and street signs, and tearing down a new jail before it could even be completed, the city fathers decided to hire a marshal. And that’s how Bear River Tom Smith became another prototype – the lawman without a gun." Thus, goes the traditional story, Marshal Smith ruled Abilene with a rod of iron. Enforcing a no-carry law that fairly much stopped drunken shootings, Smith – a huge boxer/street-fighter from New York – would simply walk up to any recalcitrant cowboy and thump them hard in the face. Six months later, Smith was killed trying to arrest a farmer, so the City Council instead hired famous gunman Wild Bill Hickok to enforce law and order. Richard O’Connor enthused in Collier’s Encyclopedia (1966): "[Hickok’s reputation as one of the greatest of the peace officers of the post-Civil War West was built in the years from 1868 to 1871, when he was sheriff at Hays City and city marshal at Abilene, during the wildest days of their history. Unaided, he kept the cowtowns under control, walking the streets with .44 revolvers on his hips ... the prototype of the iron-handed marshal who held the line until civilization caught up with the frontier." This kind of account is virtually all you will find if you google law and order in Abilene, but it is important to realise that it is a fiction touted by Hollywood films, sensationalist stories of the Wild West, and the tourist trade. It bears little resemblance to reality.
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REALITY #1: Hickok was no panacea Hickok was more gambler and gunman than lawman. He served only 4 months in Hays and 8 months in Abilene, where he spent most of his time playing poker in the Alamo saloon whilst his three policemen did the work … one of whom he shot dead by accident, after which he was dismissed. Stuart Henry, brother of the Mayor, wrote of him: "He acted only too ready to shoot down, to kill out-right, instead of avoiding assassination when possible as the higher duty of a marshal. Such a policy of taking justice into his own hands exemplified, of course, but a form of lawlessness." Moreover, claimed Henry, Hickock killed only two criminals (and one deputy) during his time as Marshal.
REALITY #2: The job of the Marshal was not all arrests and gunfights. The records of the City Council reveal yet another side of the story. The historian Robert Dykstra (1961) listed mentions of Hickok and his role as town Marshal in the City Minutes:
These duties reveal that the stereotype of a town marshal strolling round, shooting outlaws is far from their actual role; in reality, Hickok was as much council functionary as custodian of the law.
REALITY #3: Abilene was never ‘lawless’ Abilene in 1871, asserted Henry, was not the citadel of crime and disorder that writers had described it; gunfights and other violence were the exception rather than the rule. Abilene in 1866 may have been tiny, but in 1861 it had become the County seat, and therefore the location of the County courthouse. The city jail was the first stone building to be constructed in the city and – although it is true that a band of cowboys demolished it when their cook was imprisoned – it was rebuilt under a guard. There was a city council, and regularly elected county officers, although it is suggested that they did not even try to enforce the law in ‘Texas’ Abilene In 1869, the citizens applied for incorporation, and in the spring of 1870 the board of trustees met again and elected TC Henry as chairman and appointed W. Fancher, a teacher in the school, as secretary. Thirty-two saloons were licensed, closing hours indicated, houses of ill-fame in the city limits were outlawed, and an attempt was made to recognize and enforce laws. A no-carry rule ended the gunfights and wild shooting. The split nature of Abilene meant that most of the rowdiness took place on ‘the other side of the tracks’ in ‘Texas’ Abilene. And what the respectable people did not see did not necessarily disturb them, especially if they were tradesmen making money from the cowboys. Moreover, the drives were a seasonal event, their start marked by the arrival of large numbers of prostitutes in spring, and over by late autumn, so you have to remember also that the period of REAL rowdiness, when the cowboys were letting off steam after the long drives, was limited to the summer months. There is an argument that Abilene was more like Ibiza than anarchy.
REALITY #4: The problem solved itself Meanwhile, the cattle trade was declining after 1869 (when local people had demanded a bond of $20,000 from the drovers against damages and Texas Fever); instead, Abilene set about attracting homesteaders, starting with the ‘Buckeye Colony’ of 200 in 1870. From 1870 there were calls to expel the drovers altogether, who moved their business to Newton in 1871 (then Ellsworth, then Wichita), and in 1871 also there was a campaign to expel the brothels (which resulted in the trade being restricted to a certain part of town). By the time of the election of the first mayor in 1871 – and before the appointment of Wild Bill Hickok as Marshal – the Abilene Chronicle reported: "In point of morals and quietness the Abilene of today is as unlike the Abilene of two years ago as day is unlike the darkness of night. Our people are as intelligent and orderly as those of any other town or city in Kansas or elsewhere…" Thus the period in which Abilene – never without the systems of law – and allowing a single lynching in 1872, when a mob took from the jail and hanged a murderer whom the Sheriff had arrested – might be described as ‘overwhelmed by lawlessness’ lasted at most from 1867 to 1871, was limited to the ‘Texas’ part of the town, was confined to the summer months, and was mostly drunken cowboy rowdiness.
THE PROBLEMS OF A COWTOWN Nevertheless, writing in 1883, AT Andreas summed up Abilene’s time as a cowtown: "Whilst the cattle trade made Abilene quite a business point, it did not add anything to the morals of the place, and many men who had embarked on business would not bring their families to locate where bad men, vile women and gross immorality prevailed to such a large extent. "From 1867 to 1872 Abilene was an out-and-out cowboy town. The cowboy is a character of frontier life, and a very bad character at that. Away from all humanising influences of civilisation, and many of them fugitives from justice, when they strike a town and become half or three-fourths drunk, they give full licence to their base and evil passions… When two or three hundred such characters congregate in a town it seems as if pandemonium was let loose… "In [1871] the cattle trade was moved to a point further west, and Abilene was rid of the cowboys. Nor was getting rid of these the most important feature, in a moral point of view, connected with the removal of the cattle trade; because with it went all the gamblers, cutthroats, blacklegs and prostitutes with which the place had been infested since the cattle trade had been established at Abilene."
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The Alamo Saloon, AbileneThe Alamo was the most elaborate of the saloons … housed in a long room with a forty-foot frontage on Cedar street, facing the west. There was an entrance at either end. At the west entrance were three double glass doors. Inside and along the front of the south side was the bar with its array of carefully polished brass fixtures and rails. From the back bar arose a large mirror, which reflected the brightly sealed bottles of liquor. At various places over the walls were huge paintings in cheaply done imitations of the nude masterpieces of the venetian Renaissance painters. Covering the entire floor space were gaming tables, at which practically any game of chance could be indulged. The Alamo boasted an orchestra, which played forenoons, afternoons, and nights. In the height of the season the saloons were the scene of constant activity. At night the noises that were emitted from them were a combination of badly rendered popular music, coarse voices, ribald laughter and Texan "whoops," punctuated at times by gun shots. George L. Cushman, Abilene, First of the Kansas Cow Towns (1940).
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