The Fall of Abilene

  There’s another thing Mike told me. “Everybody deserves a second chance. And hell’s filled with fools who never realized or believed that. But I know you deserve it. I got faith in you.”

  Faith. Mike, I never deserved that. I never deserved you for a friend. But if it’s not too late, I’m going to try my damnedest to prove you right.

  THE END

  Author’s Note

  While this is a work of fiction, the basic facts are true, or, at least, close to true. Noah Benton, my narrator, however, is a fabrication.

  Did John Wesley Hardin really pull the fabled border-shift move and get the drop on Wild Bill Hickok? Leon C. Metz, whose John Wesley Hardin: Dark Angle of Texas remains the definitive biography of the Texas gunman, always argued that it actually happened. The late Joseph G. Rosa, the preeminent biographer of Wild Bill Hickok, considered the story bunk. The only primary account of the incident comes from Hardin’s autobiography, The Life of John Wesley Hardin as Written by Himself, which was published after Hardin was shot to death in El Paso, Texas, in 1895. No contemporary accounts from Texas cowboys or Abilene merchants, or reports in period newspapers, have ever been discovered that confirm the incident.

  I put it in because, well, it makes for a pretty good story. Besides, artist Thom Ross once told me: Hardin wrote that he was rolling tenpins when the incident started. Tenpins? If Hardin made this up, Ross argued, don’t you think he would have come up with something a whole lot more exciting than bowling?

  Certainly, the railroad had brought bowling west, and in 1869 the Leavenworth Bulletin reported that the Kansas Legislature had passed acts to levy and collect taxes from all sorts of businesses, including “ball and tenpin alleys, without regard to the number of pins used” and “To restrain prohibit and suppress tippling shops, billiard tables, tenpin alleys, ball alleys, houses of prostitution, and other disorderly practices and houses, games and gambling houses, desecrations of the Sabbath day, commonly called Sunday, and all kinds of indecencies.”

  Further examination of Kansas newspapers revealed just how popular or irritating, depending on the source, bowling had become in Kansas in the early 1870s, and Abilene had tenpin alleys as early as 1870.

  I lifted the Yale student’s report that he had been expelled from college for playing tenpins from an 1872 Lawrence, Kansas, newspaper.

  Agnes Lake’s circus arrived in Abilene in late July, but I moved it back to fit in with the narrative. She later married Wild Bill Hickok, whose fight to reduce her licensing fee comes from Heroes of the Plains, or Lives and Wonderful Adventures of Wild Bill, Buffalo Bill, Kit Carson, Capt. Payne, “White Beaver,” Capt. Jack, Texas Jack, California Joe, and Other Celebrated Indian Fighters, Scouts, Hunters, and Guides by James W. Buel. Buel has often been accused of fabricating and embellishing—as many alleged historians were in 1883—but, again, I thought it made for a fun story. I used Agnes Lake Hickok: Queen of the Circus, Wife of a Legend by Linda A. Fisher and Carrie Bowers, as well as Rosa’s They Called Him Wild Bill: The Life and Adventures of James Butler Hickok for much information on the meeting and romance of Hickok and Lake. Orin Copple King’s Only Big Show Coming: Volume 1, 1853-1878 gave me some insight into the circus.

  I switched other things around for the purpose of narrative flow, took a few educated guesses on some elements, and made up other details because that’s what fiction writers do.

  Don’t quote me in your term paper.

  In addition to the aforementioned books, other published sources used include The Trampling Herd: The Story of the Cattle Range in America by Paul I. Wellman; The Chisholm Trail by Wayne Gard; The Chisholm Trail by Sam P. Ridings; The Chisholm Trail: High Road of the Cattle Kingdom by Don Worcester; Frontier Gambling: The Games, the Gamblers, & the Great Gambling Halls of the Old West by G. R. Williamson; Knights of the Green Cloth: the Saga of Frontier Gamblers by Robert K. DeArment; Encyclopedia of Western Gunfighters by Bill O’Neal; Wild, Woolly, & Wicked: The History of the Kansas Cow Towns and The Texas Cattle Trade and Great American Cattle Trails: The Story of the Old Cow Paths of the East and the Longhorn Highways of the Plains, both by Harry Sinclair Drago; Deep Trails in the Old West: A Frontier Memoir by Frank Clifford (edited by Frederick Nolan); Cowboy Culture: A Saga of Five Centuries by David Dary; Trail Dust and Saddle Leather by Jo Mora; Great Gunfighters of the Kansas Cowtowns, 1867-1886 by Nyle H. Miller and Joseph W. Snell; Cattle Kingdom: The Hidden History of the Cowboy West by Christopher Knowlton; The Cattle Towns by Robert R. Dykstra; Cowtown—Abilene: The Story of Abilene, Kansas: 1867-1875 by Stewart P. Verckler; Early Days in Abilene Kansas: “Where It All Started” by Henry B. Jameson; Collections of the Kansas State Historical Society, Volume 9; Ben Thompson: Portrait of a Gunfighter by Thomas C. Bicknell and Chuck Parsons; The Illustrated Life and Times of Wild Bill Hickok by Bob Boze Bell; and Rosa’s The West of Wild Bill Hickok and Wild Bill Hickok, Gunfighter: An Account of Hickok’s Gunfights. I also dug up a lot of information from period Kansas and Missouri newspapers thanks to NewspaperArchive.com, Newspapers.com, and the State Historical Society of Missouri.

  All those were wonderful tools, but my deepest gratitude goes to director Michael Hook and the staff at the Dickinson County Heritage Center for their help and support with research, and Julie Roller at Abilene City Hall and other Abilene residents for being welcoming and taking time to answer my questions.

  Johnny D. Boggs

  Santa Fe, New Mexico

  About the Author

  Johnny D. Boggs has worked cattle, shot rapids in a canoe, hiked across mountains and deserts, traipsed around ghost towns, and spent hours poring over microfilm in library archives—all in the name of finding a good story. He’s also one of two Western writers to have won seven Spur Awards from Western Writers of America (for his novels, Camp Ford in 2006, Doubtful Cañon in 2008, and Hard Winter in 2010, Legacy of a Lawman, West Texas Kill, both in 2012, Return to Red River in 2017, and his short story, “A Piano at Dead Man’s Crossing” in 2002) as well as the Western Heritage Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum (for his novel Spark on the Prairie: The Trial of the Kiowa Chiefs in 2004). A native of South Carolina, Boggs spent almost fifteen years in Texas as a journalist at the Dallas Times Herald and Fort Worth Star-Telegram before moving to New Mexico in 1998 to concentrate full time on his novels. Author of dozens of published short stories, he has also written for more than fifty newspapers and magazines and is a frequent contributor to Boys’ Life and True West. His Western novels cover a wide range. The Lonesome Chisholm Trail (2000) is an authentic cattle-drive story, while Lonely Trumpet (2002) is a historical novel about the first black graduate of West Point. The Despoilers (2002) and Ghost Legion (2005) are set in the Carolina backcountry during the Revolutionary War. The Big Fifty (2003) chronicles the slaughter of buffalo on the southern plains in the 1870s, while East of the Border (2004) is a comedy about the theatrical offerings of Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickok, and Texas Jack Omohundro, and Camp Ford (2005) tells about a Civil War baseball game between Union prisoners of war and Confederate guards. “Boggs’s narrative voice captures the old-fashioned style of the past,” Publishers Weekly said, and Booklist called him “among the best Western writers at work today.” Boggs lives with his wife Lisa and son Jack in Santa Fe.