Opinion | The real history of the Wild West, told through my grandfather’s gun (2024)

Their only value lies in their connection to people we knew, loved ones who are long gone. My mother had no use for the bounty of fragile objects she offloaded on me, but maybe she hung on to them because they reminded her of her parents’ middle-class resilience in Depression-era Kansas.

My father’s side had no such trove. My paternal grandfather had been lucky to inherit a farm when he was in his early 20s, but it all blew away in the Dust Bowl. When he died in 1957 at age 69, he was scraping by as a bellhop at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver and living in a rundown rooming house with my grandmother and the few possessions they had left.

She had a Royal Doulton rose jar and a Georgian silver set. My grandfather Morris had only one treasure: an old revolver with a notch carved on the handle.

Why, I wondered nearly 70 years later, did he cling to that beat-up thing, even after he lost everything else?

He had gotten it and the farm from his foster father, a lawman in post-Civil War Kansas named George Nelson Moses. The gun eventually ended up with my brother, who lived for years in Dodge City, Kan., and stashed it at a place called, yes, Gunsmoke Storage. He finally gave it to me to deal with.

My first step was to get an estimate from an online auction site. Though the gun was scratched up, the appraiser identified it from photos as an 1860 Colt Army revolver, standard issue in its day, valued between $1,000 and $2,000 — “depending on its origin.”

I naively thought a Kansas historical museum would want it. But these places can be picky. They urge you to document an object’s history, hire a real appraiser and get a notarized affidavit.

At first, there was little to go on. My father died in 1970, when I was in high school, so if family stories were told about the gun and “G.N.” — which was how the older folks referred to George Moses — I wasn’t paying attention.

I did, however, vaguely recall one thing my grandmother said: G.N. had no use for Wild Bill.

It didn’t take long, thanks to Kansas county histories and newspaper archives, to discover that Moses’s revolver was far more interesting than my grandmother’s precious rose jar. The story is both astonishing and, considering the way the history of the American West is told and remembered, completely predictable. I’ll start with the astonishing part.

When we think of the Wild West, Kansas and Missouri don’t spring to mind, but both states were epicenters of lawlessness after the Civil War. Jesse and Frank James and Cole Younger were Confederate guerrilla fighters in Missouri in the mid-1860s before they became bank-robbing killers. Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson courted trouble as lawmen in Dodge City.

James B. Hickok — Wild Bill — and the Texas outlaw John Wesley Hardin sized each other up in Abilene, Kan., where Hickok was briefly the sheriff in 1871. America was already gaga over Wild Bill, thanks largely to a fulsome 1867 article in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine about his supposed exploits. The bank-robbing Dalton brothers would leave their mark in Kansas later.

George Moses’s initiation into this violent world came early. He joined the Union army in 1861 at 17, and his right forefinger was shot off during a battle in Tennessee. It must not have affected his shooting because, after the Civil War, he was recruited for a small Union militia — “all expert horsem*n” and “dead shots” who “could be relied upon to face any danger,” as he later described them. Their job was to track down Confederates who were still causing mayhem in Missouri.

Among the rebel “bushwhackers” was Archie Clement, who slaughtered and sometimes scalped unarmed Union captives and led a gang that included the young James brothers.

When Clement was spotted drinking in a hotel bar in Lexington, Mo., on Dec. 13, 1866, Moses was one of three militiamen sent to arrest him. Witnesses largely confirmed his shot-by-shot description of the wild gunfight that ensued, and the historian T.J. Stiles cited it in his biography of Jesse James.

Moses said their aim was to arrest Clement. But after the militiamen had sidled up to the bar, a fourth, more hotblooded member of their group burst through the front door and yelled, “Surrender!”

Clement lunged through a side door into an office. Moses went after him.

“Just as I slipped into the door Clement[s] turned and fired at me, the ball going through my clothes but not drawing blood,” Moses wrote. “I fired at him hitting him in the right breast, crippling him badly which accounts for his poor shooting after that.”

The gunfight secured the legend of Little Archie, who, though badly wounded, scrambled into the street and climbed on his horse while being shot at by Moses and others. His dying words, according to various sources, were, “I told you I’d never surrender.” (Moses said his actual last words were “Oh, hell!” But that doesn’t make as good a story.)

In dark corners of the internet, Clement lives on as a rebel martyr, and you can find directions to his supposed Missouri gravesite (adorned with a Confederate battle flag). That Jesse James idolized this psychopath as “one of the noblest boys” and vowed revenge only magnified the mythologizing.

With the rebels subdued in Missouri, Moses headed west. Like Hickok, Moses hunted buffalo and worked as a marshal and scout. He ranged through lawless settlements in Colorado and the Southwest before he helped found the central Kansas town of Great Bend, where he served as the first sheriff from 1871 to 1875.

The new town was on the Santa Fe Trail, and it was soon plagued by disorderly Texas cowboys on cattle drives. Saloons, brothels and gambling halls sprang up to serve them. If Great Bend failed to achieve the notoriety of Dodge City or other cow towns, Moses’s fellow citizens gave him much of the credit.

One time, a drunk Texan was riding through town, shooting at the occasional citizen. Moses was summoned and began walking down the street toward him. “The man started swinging his gun hand toward G.N. when the latter spoke to him pleasantly enough,” according to a Great Bend Tribune account. “G.N. wasn’t trying to pull a gun and still kept coming.” When he neared the cowboy, he reached up as if to shake his hand “and the next minute the gun man was off his pony and G.N.’s grip on his shoulder made him forget all his belligerency.”

A showdown in the summer of 1872 was so memorable that, 36 years later, the Kansas Historical Society asked Moses to write about it.

In a 4½-page account he typed in blue ink, he recalled that a cowboy had “ravished” a woman at an isolated homestead, and her husband rode into town demanding justice. With a warrant in hand, Moses and a marshal, James Gainsford, who had been Hickok’s deputy in Abilene, scoured the territory’s vast cattle herds, saloons and dance halls with no luck. Then, after midnight on a dark street in the town of Ellsworth, a man whispered to them to follow him up to a railroad track.

“I was beginning to get nervous, thinking there was a trap,” Moses wrote. But the man, who it turned out was the head of the cattle crew the wanted suspect was riding in, was merely terrified. He made them promise never to reveal who ratted out the outlaw, whom he said was “one of the best shots in Texas” and had killed men on the trail. “We thanked him for the information and started back for town. His last words were, ‘Be sure and kill him.’”

Early the next morning, with the angry husband tagging along, they spotted the cowboy in a creekside camp, alone except for a cook. The husband’s job was to hold the horses if Moses and Gainsford dismounted to move closer to their target. But after the outlaw spotted them and started shooting, the husband galloped off; “that was the last I ever saw of him,” Moses wrote.

In the hail of bullets that followed, Moses was fairly sure he had wounded the gunman. But just as he and Gainsford were moving in, six horsem*n waving their guns raced up from another direction. He and Gainsford trained their weapons on them. They were drovers on the outlaw’s cattle crew. Moses warned them to steer clear of the “little gunplay,” and they rode off. In the time this took, and despite the lawmen’s exhaustive searching, the culprit got away.

“We started home, very much crestfallen for I had been marshal and sheriff in both Missouri and Kansas for a long time and this was the first time I had ever failed getting a man I was sent after,” Moses wrote.

When they finally got back to Great Bend, hungry and tired, Moses took the warrant back to the justice of the peace. He wrote across it: “Received this writ [blank date]. Served the same by shooting at the d — d son of a ----, but didn’t get him.” Later, he heard from the owner of the cattle herd that “our man” crawled into camp, got a horse and died on the trail soon thereafter.

Before Moses was sheriff, he could be as co*cky as any famous gunslinger. At a construction camp in western Kansas, where “the gamblers, painted women and thugs were robbing several hundred railroad laborers,” a Santa Fe surveyor, David Heizer, told of how Moses went to a bar to collect a debt from a saloonkeeper who refused to pay him back.

“It made G.N. mad and he kicked him out of the place and took charge of the saloon himself,” Heizer wrote. “We believe that Jim Gainsford was with him at the time.”

“The saloon man went out and gathered his gang and went back to fix G.N. The latter was ready and had Gainsford stationed behind the door. When the gang filed in, G.N. trained two guns on them and invited them to get out and stay out. He ran the saloon for two days, took in $68 and then turned it back to the owner and said that he had collected the interest due at least.”

Moses looked the part of the Western gunman. Heizer first met him when he galloped into a railroad labor camp one evening on a white pony:

“He was six feet tall, straight as an Indian, wore a slouch hat, a blue shirt, open at the throat, a pair of buckskin trousers, fringed down the seams and top boots. His face was bronzed by the desert sun, his features were hard and stern and to emphasize the caste a pair of navy 44s were slung from his belt. But through it all shone a pair of eyes as blue, clear and true, as the sky above us.”

If that sounds gushy, you aren’t a reader of Wild West biographies. Hickok, especially, dazzled everyone with his “herculean chest” and “long, wavy, silk curls” — “one of the most perfect types of physical manhood I ever saw,” George Armstrong Custer said.

But my grandmother was right: G.N. did not speak well of Hickok.

“Wild Bill was a dead shot and a quick man on the draw, but he was a sneak with the gun and wanton with the same,” Moses is quoted as saying in a newspaper reminiscence. “He killed many men without provocation and without giving them a chance for their lives and took undue advantages.”

He also said Hickok could be a coward. He recalled being in an Abilene saloon when Wild Bill took a “bully’s dislike” to a cavalryman Moses knew in Missouri. When his friend “dared Hickok to draw his gun or attempt to arrest him,” he backed out.

Hickok’s fabled career as a lawman in Abilene lasted only a matter of months. He joined an entertainment troupe of Buffalo Bill Cody’s, but soon quit, and made his living playing poker. He was 39 in 1876 when he was shot dead from behind in a gambling hall in the Dakota Territory town of Deadwood.

Moses would have a longer and nobler life. After serving as Great Bend’s sheriff, he was elected mayor several times, and he and his brother built a successful mercantile business. He was on the board of three banks, and owned an ice plant and rich farmlands. He testified in a U.S. Supreme Court case on water rights for Kansas farmers. He and his wife, who had no biological children, helped support local orphans. They took in my grandfather when he was a toddler.

When Moses died of cancer in 1911 at 67, the Great Bend Tribune ran two pages of tributes, and businesses closed for his funeral. Describing him as “one of the best known peace officers in the West,” the eulogists said he did not get his due — “he never boasted of his deeds” and “never played up the part he played in early day incidents that belonged to him.”

All that’s left is his Colt Model 1860 Army percussion revolver with the notch on the handle. I recruited a top expert in vintage firearms who, taking into account the history of its owner, estimated the gun’s value at $15,000. A historical society will want it now.

So what is the predictable part of this good-guy-with-a-gun tale?

America remembers and even lionizes the gunslingers and stone-cold killers and hucksters of the Wild West, but it forgets other people who were no less fearless, but more bent on keeping the peace and founding churches than hanging out in brothels and preening for East Coast reporters and photographers.

This fascination extends to the value of the guns these storied characters carried. Jesse James — “that great bank robber,” in the words of former president Donald Trump — had the same model revolver as Moses had. With its belt and holster, it sold in 2009 for $230,000. A Colt .45 belonging to Wyatt Earp, who was both a lawman and a reputed brothel pimp in Wichita, went for $225,000 in 2014.

I will never know what is so special about the gun George Moses passed down to my grandfather. Does the notch mean it was used to shoot someone who needed killing — someone like Archie Clement?

Does it matter? The gun’s real value has nothing to do with its death count. What matters is the mettle of the forgotten man who carried it, as reflected in how he was eulogized in 1911:

“Civilization in overtaking him did not change him. The man of modesty, the man of courage and strong convictions, the man of great strength and physical prowess he was to be feared in any encounter and he had many. They found him right in character. It was in his blood.”