Deadly Dozen: Forgotten Gunfighters of the Old West, Volume 3 (review)

Robert K. DeArment's third collection of a dozen obscure gunfighters entertains, clarifies myths, and corrects legends. DeArment performed extensive research on the lives and careers of Langford "Farmer" Peel, Charley Harrison, Jim "Whispering" Smith, Jim Levy, Dave Neagle, Billy Brooks, Port Stockton, Ike Stockton, Jim McIntire, Jim Masterson, Ed Short, and Hill Loftis. DeArment is not content to accept one source's account of his subjects' lives and deaths. He presents the contradictory accounts before identifying the most likely story and supporting evidence. The author offers a short introduction and afterword, but bypasses his opportunity to draw broad conclusions about violence in the West.

DeArment's forgotten gunslingers operated at locations throughout the West from the 1850s until the 1920s. Peel, Levy, and Neagle haunted the early Nevada mining camps of the 1860s. Levy spent time in the Dakota Black Hills and Colorado before receiving fatal gunfire in Tucson, Arizona. Neagle worked as city marshal in Tombstone, Arizona, before he killed a man trying to assassinate a Supreme Court justice in California. Harrison became an important early citizen of Denver and died in Kansas when Osages attacked a Confederate expedition he led toward Colorado.

The book challenges Hollywood-inspired visions of quick-draw duels between sheriffs and outlaws and reveals the messy, chaotic nature of gunplay in the Old West. DeArment also assaults the myth of the gunfighter acting as a romantic individual. Several of DeArment's gunfighters worked for corporations or large-scale cattlemen against the interests of farmers and ranchers with small herds.

Jim Masterson provides an example of the obscure men DeArment covers. Masterson, Bat Masterson's younger brother, is often overshadowed even though Jim worked as a lawman in more places and engaged in more gunfights than Bat. Jim Masterson compiled a bloody reputation as he worked alongside his brother and Wyatt Earp in Dodge City, as a mercenary in the Kansas county seat wars, and on behalf of New Mexico cattle barons.

Bloodshed fills DeArment's tales, but the stories demonstrate that violence prevailed only among those who sought it. Even some of the gunfighters tried to live as respectable citizens. Dave Neagle, Jim McIntire, and others married, raised children, or tried to find stable jobs. The gunfighters' neighbors and contemporaries did not always respect them as heroes. Port and Ike Stockton moved freely from one side of the law to the other. In the early 1880s the people of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico harbored divided feelings about the Stocktons. The brothers fought the cowmen of the Farmington Stockman's Protective Association, earning the praise of townspeople in southern Colorado and the hatred of New Mexico cattlemen. Reputations followed men, and shifting political alliances might place a lawman out of office and in a fight with his replacement. Billy Brooks tangled with Texas cowboys as the marshal of Newton, Kansas, before straying to the other side of the law. Conversely, Ed Short, another veteran of the Kansas county seat wars, became a lawman in Oklahoma.

The Deadly Dozen includes four Texans: the Stocktons, Jim McIntire, and Hill Loftis. McIntire joined the Texas Rangers and participated in vicious exchanges with American Indians before working as a corporate mercenary. Authorities indicted McIntire and Fort Worth's Jim Courtright for the brutal murder of two homesteaders while they worked for New Mexico cattle barons. Loftis came to North Texas at age thirteen and worked as a cowboy until he became an outlaw in 1895.