Tag Archives: Wichita

The Regulator

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The Regulator Age of the Gunfighter Wichita 2019

There was a time when the law was spread pretty thin in the west and some would-be desperados, bandits, outlaws, rustlers and those with just plain bad attitudes took full advantage of the situation.

Good god-fearing people trying to do the right things and live in a law abiding way were taken advantage of and suffered at the hands of these no good criminal types until they finally had enough. To fight this lawlessness they banded together and formed a group called Vigilantes or Regulators to take the law into their own hands and protect themselves. These groups or individuals had no real legal standing other than Might makes Right and sometimes were as bad as the criminals they brought their heavy handed justice to.

Usually the Regulators would ride out and capture and administer western justice in the form of a swift hanging, or shooting whoever they thought were scoundrels, on sight. However sometimes the use of a Regulator was perverted and misused by a wealthy rancher hiring a fast gun as a Regulator to protect his holdings. That meant that anybody who even looked cross-eyed at his stock, or crossed his fences, or used water that wasn’t theirs or decided to free graze their herds across his land on the way to market, were fair game and could be and usually were, shot on sight by his Regulator.

Regulators have a mixed reputation with some folks thinking they were a good and necessary organization, used to uphold what little law existed by removing the bad elements as necessary, while others saw them as just as lawless and murderous as the bad men they were regulating. This was especially prevalent thought with the sheepmen and farmers moving in to share the west who often bore the brunt of the Regulators wrath.

Regulators usually only lasted as long as there was no legal law in an area and soon disbanded as real law enforcement moved in. Whether you thought killing somebody was justified or not, you couldn’t just kill them because it felt good. If you did, whether you were a Regulator or not, then you went to jail or were hanged just a like a common criminal. Being a Regulator soon quickly fell out of favor.

Regulators may or may not have been a necessary evil but the men who chose this profession were a hard lot. Quick to dispense their form of justice, they were tough, single-minded men that served a purpose during those lawless times in the old west.

Florence Nightshade Angel of the Night

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There were good people in the town of Wichita. Probably more than we thought were there. We’ve heard about the ones that weren’t so good, and the ones who were borderline good with a dash of bad thrown in. But not all that much about the good folks. The ones who did good things out of their need to bring some sort of balance and harmony to the town just because of who they were.

Such was Florence Nightshade, known as the Angel of the Night. Not much is known about her background, she just showed up one day on the morning stage and by the time night fell she was out roaming the mean streets of Wichita offering solace to all who needed it. Rumors were rampant about her. She was a nurse from back east who after suffering a terrible loss in her own life came west to Wichita to help those in need, some said. Others said she once caused a death due to being inebriated on the job and swore to make up for it by tirelessly ministering to those most in need no matter what their station in life was.

Whatever her reasons she was always the first to show up after a shooting, helping the wounded and saying a quick prayer over the dead. Many a expecting mother knew her as the one who brought their child into the world when the town Doc was too drunk or sitting in on a winning hand in the saloon and couldn’t be bothered.

Most people never wondered about why she was so quiet. She kept to herself and never socialized preferring to wander the streets doing her work. Mercy was dealt by her hands and her heart and there were legions who survived their wounds only because she was there when they needed her most.

One day however she was gone. No one saw her leave. No one knows where she went. Some said she wandered off into the prairie to die from a hidden disease, others said she was abducted by terrible men. Others said she went to a little border town near the Mexican border that had even more killings and knifings than Wichita. Wherever she went we can assume she is still tending to those in need at a new place in desperate need of an Angel of the Night.


Wyatt Earp and the Faro Table

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Being a marshal in a town like Wichita meant long hours and the risk of becoming dead at the hand or hands of those who made a career of flaunting the law. During its heyday Wichita had more than its share of those individuals. It took a strong man to face the daily dangers of the streets of Wichita and for very little pay.

As marshal, Wyatt Earp was just one of those men. Much has been said about Wyatt in books, magazines, and film and most of it was true, however some small points were left out such as how he supplemented his meager pay with other forms of income.

There was the levying of fines against those individuals for the apprehension and inconvenience of having to smack them along side of their heads with his pistol due to their uncooperative nature. The fine for this would be adjusted of course, to reflect the number of times they had to be hit on the head for Wyatt to get his point across and for their ultimate compliance. But this activity entailed a certain amount of risk on the marshal’s part so something less dangerous and more lucrative was desired.

Which brings us to Gambling. Wyatt definitely was involved with gambling as it was the easiest and least dangerous of his daily activities. It was also the most lucrative. Gambling in and of itself is not inherently dangerous, however it is terribly unforgiving of fools. And though fools did abide in great numbers in Wichita they mainly kept to doing things that were confined to the disadvantage of their ownselves and rarely involved great numbers of innocent bystanders. There were exceptions however, such as the half wit who got drunk and drove a team and freight wagon through a parade of temperance demonstrators, running over several of the ladies and scattering the rest like a flock of chickens because he didn’t like their singing. That was unfortunate but tensions ran high regarding that subject. There were fines aplenty for that little escapade.

However back to gambling. Wyatt’s favorite game of chance was the Faro table. He was good at it and it basically paid his wages during his term as marshal. Shown here, Wyatt sits at his Faro table, arms open and outstretched like a spider enticing its prey into its web. Both the wary and unwary entered willingly, ultimately offering up their hard earned gains to the game. It was rare that Wyatt ever to had to shoot some objectionable fellow in the eyeball during one of these games but as was mentioned before, fools did abide in plenty in Wichita and the unfortunate situation did develope occasionally, but not often as it was bad for business.

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.