Hot Springs, America’s Forgotten Capital of Vice

Al Capone was one of the many gangsters who enjoyed vacationing in Hot Springs.

(NYTimes) ... Hot Springs, as David Hill writes in “The Vapors,” a history of the town during its sin-soaked heyday, let a lot of people be — with varying degrees of vengeance. Among them were workaday gamblers and good-timers like Kelley, but also bookmakers, con artists, prostitutes, shills, crooked auctioneers, outlandishly corrupt politicians and boldface-named mobsters. From about 1870 until 1967, when the reformist governor Winthrop Rockefeller shut off the vice spigot, the town’s chief municipal expression was a wink. The mayors winked. The cops winked. The preachers winked, or at least averted their gaze. Winking was how a Bible Belt town of 28,000 (circa 1960) attracted upward of five million visitors per year and why, as Hill writes, on any given Saturday night, there may have been “no more exhilarating place to be in the entire country.” Continued

John R. Brinkley

Courtesy of The Radio Historian

(Wikipedia) John Romulus Brinkley (later John Richard Brinkley; July 8, 1885 – May 26, 1942) was an American quack who fraudulently claimed to be a medical doctor. He had no legitimate medical education and bought his medical degree from a "diploma mill". Brinkley became known as the "goat-gland doctor" after he achieved national fame, international notoriety and great wealth through the xenotransplantation of goat testicles into humans. 

Although initially Brinkley promoted this procedure as a means of curing male impotence, eventually he claimed that the technique was a virtual panacea for a wide range of male ailments. He operated clinics and hospitals in several states, and despite the fact that almost from the beginning, detractors and critics in the medical community thoroughly discredited his methods, he was able to continue his activities for almost two decades. 

He was also, almost by accident, an advertising and radio pioneer who began the era of Mexican border blaster radio. Continued

Book Review: The Stolen Pinkerton Reports of the Colonel Albert J. Fountain Murder Investigation

(Wild West) This is Vol. 6 in the Mesilla Valley History Series, editor David Thomas having written the first five volumes. The murder of Albert Jennings Fountain on Feb. 1, 1896, caused even more shock and outrage than might be expected in New Mexico Territory, as killed alongside the prominent attorney was his 8-year-old son, Henry. The double murder was never solved, despite an investigation by Doña Ana County Sheriff Pat Garrett, the man who’d killed Billy the Kid, and Pinkerton National Detective Agency operatives John Conklin Fraser and William C. Sayers. Continued

The Fleagle Gang

(Wikipedia) The Fleagle Gang was a group of early 20th century American bank robbers and murderers. They were found and executed or killed after robbing the First National Bank in Lamar, Colorado. Their cases were the first in which the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) used a single fingerprint as part of the evidence leading to a conviction.
They were also suspected to have committed a series of previous bank robberies over a 10-year period. Continued

Outlaws Abandon Fort: Cattle Stealing "Mesa Hawks" Pursued by Officers

An early, and quite sensational, account of cattle rustlers in the Quay Valley.

The Spikes - Gholson Feud

The Spikes brothers, playing with guns.
(Find-A-Grave)

Sam Gholson, alleged bad
guy in all this, though
I have my doubts.

(Digging History) This family feud simmered quite awhile before it ended in the early 1900’s in eastern New Mexico, in an area now known as Quay County. 
The feud began in east Texas during the Civil War when the two patriarchs of the Spikes and Gholson families crossed paths, or should I say just “crossed.”
John Wesley Spikes (see this week’s Tombstone Tuesday article here in case you missed it) was a member of the Texas 12th Cavalry, whose job was rounding up draft evaders.  During the Civil War men were often recruited with the “point-of-a-gun” rather than willingly join the cause. Continued

Stately Spikes Manor. Reminds me of that line in the movie Dillinger, "Decent people don't live that good!" Anywho, the historian J. Evetts Haley wrote a history of the XIT Ranch naming the Spikes' guilty as charged. The Spikes family sued for libel, lining up every Spikes from here to the Atlantic to file a separate case. First up was old Fred Spikes himself, who lost, meaning that the jury wasn't convinced that he wasn't a cattle rustler. Nevertheless, with a half dozen more cases left to go, the XIT settled out of court for a pittance. Today's lazy historians see "out of court settlement" and assume that the Spikes brothers were as pure as the driven snow. But that jury didn't think so; no sir, they did not. See XIT Libel Suit Won by Defendants

Black Jack Ketchum captured

(Wikipedia) On August 16, 1899, Tom Ketchum, supposedly knowing nothing of the July 11 hold-up which ended in the death of his brother Sam, single-handedly attempted to rob the same train again at the same place and in the same way that he and Sam and others had robbed it just a few weeks earlier. The train conductor, Frank Harrington, saw Tom approaching the moving train. He recognized him, grabbed a shotgun, and shot Tom in the arm, knocking him off his horse.
The train continued, and the next day a posse came out and found Tom beside the tracks, badly wounded. He was transported to medical facilities at Trinidad, Colorado, and his right arm had to be amputated. He was nursed back to health and then sent to Clayton, New Mexico Territory, for trial. Continued

Crazy Fourth: How Jack Johnson Kept His Heavyweight Title and Put Las Vegas, New Mexico, on the Map

Jack Johnson

(Amazon) In 1912 boxing was as popular a spectator sport in the United States as baseball, if not more so. It was also rife with corruption and surrounded by gambling, drinking, and prostitution, so much so that many cities and states passed laws to control it. But not in New Mexico. It was the perfect venue for one of the biggest, loudest, most rambunctious heavyweight championship bouts ever seen. In Crazy Fourth Toby Smith tells the story of how the African American boxer Jack Johnson--the bombastic and larger-than-life reigning world heavyweight champion--met Jim Flynn on the Fourth of July in Las Vegas, New Mexico. Continued

Jesse Evans

(Wikipedia) Jesse Evans (1853 – ????) was an outlaw and gunman of the Old West, and leader of the Jesse Evans Gang. He has received some attention due to his disappearance in 1882, after which he was never seen or heard from again.
... Evans began working as a cowboy, employed by several ranches, to include that of John Chisum. After he ended his employment with Chisum, Evans ventured to both Las Cruces and La Mesilla, New Mexico, where he became associated with John Kinney. At the time, Kinney was leading one of the more well known gangs of the New Mexico Territory, called the John Kinney Gang. Evans joined the gang, and over time he and Kinney became close. Continued

1598: Juan de Oñate makes a formal declaration of his Conquest of New Mexico

(Wikipedia) Juan de Oñate y Salazar (1550–1626) was a conquistador from New Spain, explorer, and colonial governor of the Santa Fe de Nuevo México province in the Viceroyalty of New Spain. He led early Spanish expeditions to the Great Plains and Lower Colorado River Valley, encountering numerous indigenous tribes in their homelands there.
Oñate founded settlements in the province, now part of the present-day American Southwest. Continued

Ludlow Massacre

 

(Wikipedia) The Ludlow Massacre was an attack by the Colorado National Guard and Colorado Fuel & Iron Company camp guards on a tent colony of 1,200 striking coal miners and their families at Ludlow, Colorado, on April 20, 1914. About two dozen people, including miners' wives and children, were killed. The chief owner of the mine, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was widely criticized for the incident.
The massacre, the culmination of an extensive strike against Colorado coal mines, resulted in the violent deaths of between 19 and 26 people; reported death tolls vary but include two women and eleven children, asphyxiated and burned to death under a single tent. Continued

1922: Albert Fall Gives Away the Store

Albert Fall: New Mexican
 politician and crook

(Wikipedia) The Teapot Dome Scandal was a bribery incident that took place in the United States from 1921 to 1922, during the administration of President Warren G. Harding.
Secretary of the Interior Albert Bacon Fall had leased Navy petroleum reserves at Teapot Dome in Wyoming and two other locations in California to private oil companies at low rates without competitive bidding.
In 1922 and 1923, the leases became the subject of a sensational investigation by Senator Thomas J. Walsh. Fall was later convicted of accepting bribes from the oil companies and became the first Cabinet member to go to prison. Continued

Grumpy Old Men on the Trail of Glamorous Killers

(NYTimes) … To call “The Highwaymen” revisionist — or even reactionary — would be an understatement. This retelling of the Bonnie and Clyde story is not content to posit that those two Depression-era outlaws got what they deserved when they died in a hail of bullets on a Louisiana back road. It has a sackful of bones to pick with the modern world as a whole.
Violent criminals are a problem, yes, but so are movies, airplanes, car radios, women in politics, newspapers — you name it. If Grandpa Simpson could figure out how to get himself a Netflix subscription, this movie would be the whole algorithm. I’m here to say I didn’t entirely hate it. Continued

Texas Ranger who killed Bonnie and Clyde gets film redemption at last in 'The Highwaymen'

The posse. Top: Hinton, Oakley, Gault; seated: Alcorn, Jordan, and Frank Hamer.

(USA Today) Frank Hamer, the former Texas Ranger who was brought out of retirement to stop gangsters Bonnie and Clyde, has found film redemption through Kevin Costner's laconic portrayal in "The Highwaymen."
Costner's role in the drama, which premiered Sunday at the South By Southwest film festival in Austin ahead of its March 15 theatrical release (streaming March 29 on Netflix), gives Hamer's point of view in leading the effort to stop criminal couple Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, dramatically killing the duo in a hail of bullets in 1934. Continued

Jesse Evans

(Wikipedia) Jesse Evans (1853 – ????) was an outlaw and gunman of the Old West, and leader of the Jesse Evans Gang. He has received some attention due to his disappearance in 1882, after which he was never seen or heard from again.
... Evans began working as a cowboy, employed by several ranches, to include that of John Chisum. After he ended his employment with Chisum, Evans ventured to both Las Cruces and La Mesilla, New Mexico, where he became associated with John Kinney. At the time, Kinney was leading one of the more well known gangs of the New Mexico Territory, called the John Kinney Gang. Evans joined the gang, and over time he and Kinney became close. Continued

Lazarus Stewart: Colonial Custer

"Massacre of the Indians at Lancaster by the Paxton Boys in 1763." (John Wimer, 1841)

(Wikipedia) Captain Lazarus Stewart was an 18th century Pennsylvanian frontiersman and leader of the Paxton Boys. He achieved notoriety by leading the massacre of the Susquehannocks in 1763, and was a prominent military commander — on the Yankee side — in the Pennamite Wars. He met his death in battle with the Loyalists and Iroquois at the Wyoming Massacre, in an attack precipitated by his own rashness. Continued

"Massacre of Wyoming"

Kid Curry

(Wikipedia) Harvey Alexander Logan (1867 - June 17, 1904), also known as Kid Curry, was an American outlaw and gunman who rode with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid's infamous Wild Bunch gang. Despite being less well known than his counterparts, he has since been referred to as "the wildest of the Wild Bunch."
... He started riding with outlaw "Black Jack" Ketchum. Pinkerton detectives began trailing Curry shortly after his departure from Montana.
In January 1896, Curry received word that an old friend of Landusky's, rancher James Winters, had been spying on him, for the reward offered in his arrest. Curry and two of his brothers, Johnny and Lonny, went to Winters' ranch to confront him. However, a shootout erupted. Johnny was killed, while Curry and Lonny escaped.
Shortly after, Curry and Lonny argued with Black Jack Ketchum over the take in a train robbery. The two brothers left the gang and joined the circus. Continued

The Steer Branded MURDER

 

(Tales of Texas) The story begins on a cold, dust-blowing day with several local cattlemen working a roundup on the tan grass flat about thirty miles east of Fort Davis. 
Leader–or committee chairman–of the roundup was Eugene Kelley, and present was Henry Powe (pronounced “Poe”), soon to lie dead with several bullets in him.  He wore a full black beard and had lost his left arm at the elbow in service of the Confederacy.  He had come from Alabama to Texas in 1870 and had had some college education.  By 1883 he was grazing cattle on public land around Mount Locke, and he helped found the Methodist Church in Alpine. 
Two other men involved in the shoot-out were Finus (‘Fine”) Gilliland and Mannie (“Mannie”) Clements, both of stormy reputation. Continued

Joseph Graves Olney

(Wikipedia) Joseph Graves Olney (October 9, 1849 – December 3, 1884) was a rancher and cattleman in what is now Cochise County, Arizona.
He arrived there around 1877 and set up a ranch in the San Simon Valley.
Olney moved from Texas under circumstances which were notorious. Continued

Sand Creek Massacre

Black Kettle

(Wikipedia) The Sand Creek massacre (also known as the Chivington massacre, the Battle of Sand Creek or the massacre of Cheyenne Indians) was a massacre in the American Indian Wars that occurred on November 29, 1864, when a 675-man force of Colorado U.S. Volunteer Cavalry attacked and destroyed a village of Cheyenne and Arapaho in southeastern Colorado Territory, killing and mutilating an estimated 70–163 Native Americans, about two-thirds of whom were women and children.
The location has been designated the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site and is administered by the National Park Service. Continued