Bloody Bill Longley: The Mythology of a Gunfighter, Second Edition

Foreword

v Foreword “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” So says Maxwell Scott in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, John Ford’s 1962 film based on a short story by Dorothy N. Johnson. It is a classic line in a classic film that, unfortunately, remains all too true in the field of western Americana. The West remains mired in mythology and folklore with defenders adamantly striving to keep it there. The harsh reality is that the West was populated by people, both good and bad. This is not, of course, to say that there were no bigger-than-life figures. There were men such as Wild Bill Hickok. Hickok was a legend in his time, the topic of newspaper articles and dime novels. Now dead for more than a century, Hickok has been transformed by movies , television, and comic books into a two-gun hero, clean-cut and intrepid. Fortunately, Hickok’s main biographer, Joe Rosa, has ably sifted fact from fancy. In Wild Bill’s case, the facts are more fascinating than the legend. Hickok, indeed, was of heroic stature, but was also a human being with blemishes. This is not always the case, however. Less worthy personalities have also assumed a persona far beyond the importance they enjoyed in their lifetimes. The celebrated Wyatt Earp, for example, had a history of involvement with his brothers in prostitution as well as in enforcing the law. It cannot be proven that he ever personally killed a man, even though he was a participant in the noted OK Corral gunfight, and he and his associates were involved in several murders while in Arizona after that gunfight. Yet for all this, folklorists have vi  Foreword devoted reams of paper to building the reputation of this perhaps not-so-worthy westerner, whose “glory” was largely due to Stuart N. Lake’s fictional biography, Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal, combined with Hugh O’Brian’s portrayal of the fictional Earp on television, not the facts. In more recent years, historians interested in facts rather than legend have entered the arena of the Wild West to set the record straight. In addition to Joseph Rosa, the preeminent authority on Hickok, there are others, such as the prolific Chuck Parsons, whose works on the Sutton-Taylor War and Texas Ranger Leander McNelly are classics . Paul Spellman and Harold Weiss have captured the realities of legendary Ranger captains John H. Rogers, John A. Brooks, and Bill MacDonald. Despite this, folklorists still cling to and defend the mythology, seemingly unwilling, or unable, to deal with the realities. So the controversy continues with the Old West. One such individual, Bill Long­ ley, is well known to informed readers of western American history, although he has not achieved the fame or notoriety of such icons as Hickok or Billy the Kid. Unlike Earp, he did not have a modern publicist to transform him from pimp, murderer, occasional lawman, or whatever, into a national hero. Long­ ley has remained a generally dark presence in Texas’ frontier history. William Preston Long­ ley was born October 6, 1851, in Washington County, Texas. The family was well off, but following the Civil War, Long­ ley went bad. He was a contemporary of such men as gunfighters John Wesley Hardin and Ben Thompson, and was well aware of the vicious feuds that rocked Texas during this time, such as the SuttonTaylor Feud, the Hoo Doo War, and the Horrell-Higgins Feud. Long­ ley took part in none of this epic regional violence, though if his own accounts are to be believed, he brushed elbows with a number of these deadly men, the key word being “if.” Long­ ley was a master of spinning a wild tale, with himself as the central focus, and even with several biographies, much of his life remains a mystery today. Foreword vii To date, there have been three biographies of Long­ ley. His first biographer, Henry Clay Fuller, published The Adventures of Bill Long­ ley at the start of the twentieth century. Fuller gathered numerous newspaper clippings, ostensibly of letters written by Long­ ley, and put them into a small book that is now rare. In 1953 Ed Bartholomew, a noted Texas historian, made another effort at a Long­ ley biography, Wild Bill Long­ ley: A Texas Hard-Case. Both of these volumes, now long out of print, essentially told Long­ ley’s story from his own...