Bear River Tom and the Mud Creek Massacre
William W. Johnstone and J. A. Johnstone
It was a fine summer day in Abilene, in the Year of Our Lord 1870, when I came nigh to losin’ a fight for the first time since my days in the prize ring back in New York City.
A few weeks earlier, some of the city fathers come to me and asked me to take the job of city marshal because they knew I was a tough hombre and had wore a lawman’s star in a few other places. I accepted, but only after tellin’ ’em that the only way I’d take the job was if I had a free hand to carry it out the way I saw fit, without interference from nobody. In them days, Abilene was a mighty wild place, and had been ever since the trail herds had started comin’ up from Texas a few years earlier. Sometimes, likkered-up cowboys outnumbered the reg’lar citizens half a dozen to one. So those old boys just looked at me and said, “We don’t give a hoot in hell how you do it, Tom, just get it done.”
So the first thing I done was to get some signs made up sayin’ it was unlawful to carry firearms inside the town limits, and then I put’em up in the saloons and the whorehouses and other places where the cowboys went, and on the road leadin’ into town too. Lord, you never heard such caterwaulin’ as when those Texans saw them signs. I thought one or two of ’em was gonna fall down and go to foamin’ at the mouth. But after a few of ’em gave me lip about the new rule and I had to crack their heads together for ’em, the rest of the bunch started payin’ more attention. Killin’s fell off to where there weren’t more’n one or two a night. Compared to the way it’d been not long before, Abilene had got plumb peaceful.
. . .
