In Loving Memory

LAST OF THE BAD MEN (293 pp.)--Jay Monaghan--Bobbs-Merrill ($3.50).

A red granite stone in the Boulder, Colo, cemetery marks the grave. The inscription might be that of a deacon, grocer or Congressman: In loving memory of Tom Horn.

But Tom Horn was buried blue in the face, his tongue extruded, after the law had given him one of the fanciest hangings ever seen in Wyoming. Jay Monaghan does an excellent job of retelling the story in Last of the Bad Men. The gallows was an indoor affair, with a trap worked by a waterpower gadget. Tom had already made one escape from his cell, and was known to have rich and imaginative friends who might try to engineer another getaway. So the sheriff, taking no chances, held the hanging one day in November 1903 in a corridor of the Laramie County jail. Militiamen were posted outdoors. Tom was fitted with a five-strap leather harness, to keep his arms and legs from dangling. A couple of his cronies, invited in for the event, were asked to sing his favorite hymn, Life's Railway to Heaven. A minister said a prayer. Tom cracked a joke. Water trickled out of a tank; the trap was sprung.

The Handyman. Tom's trouble was that he had shot a few Wyoming homesteaders, and inadvertently admitted to doing in a 13-year-old boy. He himself was about 14 when he ran away from his father's Missouri farm in 1875. For the next couple of decades he bummed around the West, punching cattle, working on the railroad, acting as scout-interpreter for General George Crook and General Nelson A. Miles when they were chasing the Apache terror, Geronimo, up & down the Southwest. Finally, he developed into a "range detective" and special handyman for big Colorado-Wyoming cattlemen. His specialty was dirty jobs.

As a group the big ranchers didn't like to have homesteaders messing up their range. They called them cattle rustlers, and sometimes they were. A wholesale attempt to scare them away by vigilante methods had developed into what the history books call the Johnson County War. Tom Horn had done his bit in this war; he was cocky, range-wise, quick on the draw, an ideal trigger man. But off-duty he drank too much, and talked too much. One day in Cheyenne he boasted to a U.S. marshal that he had clipped young Willie Nickell, a homesteader's son, at 300 yards. "It was the best shot and the dirtiest trick I ever done." Hidden court stenographers were listening in the next room for just such a confession. The marshal swore out a warrant for Tom's arrest. The sheriff picked him up in the lobby of the Inter-Ocean Hotel the next day.

Fact and Legend. Jay Monaghan, now state historian of Illinois but a former Colorado rancher himself (in partnership with Historian Lloyd Lewis), says that Tom's arrest gave Cheyenne and Denver cattle barons a bad turn. They retained a batch of lawyers to defend him, appealed his conviction to the Supreme Court, and when all else failed, sent him off to the Boulder Cemetery in a high-priced white-satin-and-silver coffin. Author Monaghan knows the Tom Horn country at first hand, has talked to dozens of oldtimers who saw Tom in the flesh, has been collecting Tom Horn material for 20 or 30 years. A number of other writers, including Struthers Burt and Gene Fowler, have had their say about Tom. Last of the Bad Men ought to be the last word.

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