Monthly Archives: November 2019

When Good People Shoot Each Other

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It’s amazing how what seem to be simple little altercations can mushroom into a full scale catastrophe in a very short period of time. Take the situation below for example. Here we have a town full of good people, except for some rowdy, alcohol infused, unsavory, unwashed, profane but blasphemous black-hearted villains, who tend to cause trouble just by being in the proximity of good folks. Then we have the good folks who tend to be just a little touchy around their less than civilized neighbors. Throw in a saloon with its tenants standing on the boardwalk making rude comments to the womenfolk as they pass by and there you have it. Chaos in a handbasket. One of the more inebriated fellows made a remark about a passing lady’s bustle and she in turn replied by smacking him in the ear with her parasol. He and his cohorts thought that might have been an overreaction and the following altercation ensued.

The rowdies seen here on the left have formed into an indignant mob demanding satisfaction and have threatened bodily harm or murder and certainly mayhem at the least, to the good folks who demanded an apology and the termination of the neer-do-wells’ occupancy in the good town of Wichita. Many insults were slung accompanied by rude gestures of the rudest kind to make their point.

On the right, in every sense of the word, we have the good folks who include husbands of the aforementioned ladies, who cannot abide rudeness in any form to their womenfolk.

After a prolonged session of taunts, provocating goading, not to mention derision and mockery, there was a comment made by one of the ladies about a fellows mustache, which of course caused guns to be drawn and shots to be fired. As you are no doubt aware, one should never make any comment about a man’s moustache. Those are not only fighting words but they demand a fight to the death.

The good folks will not stand for shots fired at them in anger or any other type of mood you happen to be in and shots were quickly returned to great effect and self-righteous efficiency. Due to their calm steel-like nerves of the insulted, but decent folks, the bad guys were dropping like flies with little or no loss of life on their side as good prevailed.

As can be seen here it does not pay to have a gunfight after one has been hanging out in the saloon all day. Four men down and things are just getting started. Many times in gunfights a killed person’s leg will jerk up like that and stay that way. Just an idiosyncrasy of the old west.

On the good folks side the ladies have cast aside their indignation as bullets began poking holes in their parasols and they gathered their skirts and lit out like a herd of scalded turtles. Safety trumping vanity and insult. The menfolk however, being staunch-hearted fellows stand their ground and coolly decimate their opponents, proving beyond doubt, that good always triumphs over evil. Unless one of the good guys gets shot in the back which would happen occasionally. Then it wouldn’t.

The upshot of all this is the provocateurs wound up being just about totally kilt and none left to make more than a feeble attempt at defiance. The good folk got to walk around feeling good about themselves for giving them their comeuppance with little reprisal from their adversaries, and the town was, after a brief respite while the streets were cleared, back to normal in a short while.

The Bounty Hunter

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Wichita in the 1870’s and later had more than its share of bad men. No one was quite sure why that was. Perhaps it was its climate with its tendency to be hot as hades and laced with the kind of humidity generally found in the Amazon, or the mind numbing cold during the winters that froze the souls of anyone foolish enough to spend time out of shelter, that caused some men to become the almost mythic kind of miscreants and evil doers that walked the face of the Earth.

Or could it have been the fact that you could see for two days in any direction at nothing but nothing. There were no geological features to stop the eyes endless searching for something to focus on rather than the horizon of the endless prairie. That’s enough to send some folks over the edge.

Or it could have been the fact of an element of accepted lawlessness by the inhabitants of the city that just took terrible behavior as a fact of life at the time. Bad men were bad men, that’s how it was. But some men were so bad that it couldn’t be allowed for them to walk free, unrepentant and not held accountable for their horrendous deeds. And allowed to do even worse if left to their own devices if they weren’t stopped.

What to do about these men who chose to live outside the Code of the West that attempted to impose some type of law and order to a place where it barely existed. How do you handle men that normal men were ill equipped to deal with. That’s where the Bounty Hunter came into play. He was a hard, dangerous individual in his own right, ruthless enough and capable enough to do whatever was necessary to bring these violent, uncontrollable men to whatever justice they were due. As the infamous reputations of these bad men grew it became more and more valuable to the townsfolk to pay someone to rid them of these menaces. So a Wanted Poster was created to name these individuals and their crimes and to place a price on their heads commensurate with their reputations. The worse the man was, the more he was worth dead or perhaps in jail, but usually dead. The poster did say Dead or Alive and it was usually easier to deal with a dead man than a live one.

Marshalls and Sheriffs took care of some of them but these villains were wily and tended to move around spreading their own special havoc wherever they landed. The Bounty Hunter was free to follow them wherever they went and once locating them, terminating their existence with all due dispatch and collecting the reward each had on their head.

Some might argue that these Bounty Hunters were just as bad as the men they hunted but the end result of ridding the earth of these individuals was worth having them around. At least til they spent their money and moved on.