Pistol Pete, Veteran Of The Old West

Frank "Pistol Pete" Eaton

• Publisher: Normanby Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781786254498
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

"The autobiography of Frank "Pistol Pete" Eaton, a one–time cowboy, scout, Indian fighter, trail rider, and Deputy United States Marshall Frank Eaton died at his home in Perkins, Oklahoma, at the age of 98.
As a youth, Frank Eaton avenged his father's death when he was shot in cold blood by the Campseys and Ferbers, former Confederates who called themselves Regulators. Eaton witnessed his father's murder in 1868. In the intervening 19 years, Frank finished the job of gunning down the last of his father's murderers.
At the age of 15, the post commander at Fort Gibson. Indian Territory, dubbed Frank Eaton "Pistol Pete" when he out shot everyone at the fort.
In 1923, "Pistol Pete" gave permission for Oklahoma A & M College to use his photograph in a design of a college emblem. Today "Pistol Pete" is the model for the "Cowboy" caricature at Oklahoma State University, New Mexico State University. and the University of Wyoming.
Frank Eaton, in Pistol Pete–Veteran Of The Old West, tells about the constant struggle between law and crime and the result of crime which in those times ended with a rope or bullet. His memoirs offer a colorful, humorous, violent, and moving picture of law and lawlessness in Indian Territory."-Print ed.

1—THE NEW HOME

Father

FATHER owned a livery, feed and sales stable, in Hartford, Connecticut, where I was born on October 26, 1860.

After the Civil War Father came home from the army, sold his business, and went out to Kansas—a new country in the Far West. He went on the train, which was an adventure in itself in those days. Before he sent for Mother and us three children, he bought a farm and built a house. He had a home ready for us, so we did not have many of the hardships of the earlier pioneers.

Father was about thirty-five years old at that time, six feet tall, and weighed about one hundred and eighty-five pounds. He was a very strong man with rather short arms. He had kind brown eyes, dark brown hair and a heavy brown mustache. I was seven years old then, and I remember just how my father looked; he always wore a blue flannel shirt, summer or winter, and a pair of blue jean pants with suspenders.

I loved my father.

He was always tolerant with other people and respected their opinions, but he had strong convictions and set ideas of right and wrong. When he thought he was on the right side, he was a hard man to turn. Father was a soft-spoken man, never quarrelsome; it was hard to make him mad—but once aroused he had a violent temper and you had better get away and let Nature supply the lightning rods!

Father met us at the train at Lawrence, Kansas. We were looking out the window, trying to see him; as the train slowed to a stop we caught sight of him. He was standing by his team, holding their heads and rubbing their noses so they would not be afraid of the train. I started to rush for the door, then went back and got my little sister by the hand. Mother had my baby brother in her arms and one of the other passengers helped her with some bundles and our valise.

Father hugged us and put my sister and me into the back of the wagon. Mother and my baby brother sat up on the seat with him.

I remember how he looked at her and said, “It’s good to see you, Lizzie.”

We stopped a couple of days about six miles out of Lawrence and visited some of Father’s relatives. Then, we drove on to our new home.

The Homestead

Our home was in Osage County, Kansas, about thirty-eight miles southwest of Lawrence, at a place called Rock Springs, on the headwaters of the Red Woods Branch. Four big springs of good water came together there and it was a famous watering place and camp grounds for emigrants and freighters. (A freighter was a teamster who hauled goods and supplies from the end of the railroad to outlying points.)

There had been an old hotel on the place but it was burned by William Clarke Quantrill and his men at the time they made the raid on Lawrence, Kansas. Our house was built on the site of the ruins of the old hotel; it lay on a gentle slope of ground on the west bank of the stream about a hundred yards off the old Santa Fe Trail.

The Santa Fe Trail

The Santa Fe Trail was a great broad trail and the only real one in that part of the country at the time. It was a trade route, the first of the great transcontinental trails, between the East and West.

In 1821 a man named William Becknell freighted a load of goods by pack horses from Missouri to New Mexico. The following year he made another trip from Franklin, Missouri, and arrived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with twenty-one men and three wagonloads of goods which he sold for a good profit. Becknell was known as “the father of the Santa Fe Trail.” Others soon followed—caravans began moving west starting from the Missouri River and it was called the Santa Fe Trail. Later, Independence, Missouri, became the official starting point.

Where we lived, in Kansas, the trail was lined with sunflowers; they were beautiful and they were also used for fuel. The stalks were so large they were chopped down and cut into stove lengths and burned for wood. The flowers were dried and used for quick fires or for starting a fire. The sunflowers provided the wagon trains and caravans with fuel when they stopped at the Rock Springs Camp Ground. One of my earliest recollections is cutting down the sunflowers and watching the wagon trains on the trail.

Wagon Trains

Each wagon had its string of oxen hitched to it and the driver walked along on the left side of his team with his whip over his shoulder.

The driver was called a “bullwhacker,” He was usually a young man and he drove from two to eight yoke of oxen. He wore a wide-brimmed hat and high-topped boots with broad heels. He walked by the side of his team most of the time and commanded them with a long bullwhip.

The whip was a braided lash, from twelve to fourteen feet long, with a broad buckskin popper on the end. The whip was about one and one-half inches thick where the whipstock was tied on and ran to a true taper to the size of your little finger, where the popper was fastened. The whipstock, or handle, was of shaved hickory and was four or five feet long. From the size of a pitchfork handle at the butt, the whipstock tapered like a billiard cue, to the size of a man’s finger where the whip was fastened on. A good bullwhacker could kill a wolf or a rattlesnake with his whip and the crack of his whip was louder than a shot from a forty-five.

There was a trail boss, too, or an “emigrant boss” as he was sometimes called. He was a man who had to know his job. He was always an old plainsman. The more he knew of outlaws, Indians and the country he was traveling, the better he was. His word was law; he was in absolute control of the whole outfit. The emigrant boss knew the destination of his wagon train and his job was to get them through. When they arrived his job was done.

There never was a prettier sight than ten or twenty big wagons with boxes as high as your chin all covered over with white wagon sheets. Women and children looked out both ends of the wagon; the boys and some of the men drove the cattle and horses along in the rear. Mounted and armed men rode on the front and flanks, looking for any sign of danger. The whole outfit, moving slowly along the trail, once seen could never be forgotten.

Neighbors

There was a faint trail that branched off the Santa Fe Trail just east of our house; it ran northeast to Ottawa, Kansas. All the rest was open prairie country covered with tall grass. When we wanted to go anywhere we forked our horse and made our own trail.

All the settlements were on the streams where water was plentiful. North of us about five miles there were a dozen farms on the creek. There was a post office five miles northeast of us, at a small settlement called Twin Mounds. There were several small towns on the prairie; the nearest was Hundred-Ten—so named because it was one hundred and ten miles from the Missouri line. Then there were Carbondale, Lyndon, Ridgeway and Ottawa.

George Saffles was our nearest neighbor—he lived about half a mile south; Marcus Whittenburg lived a little farther on. Mose Beaman, Arthur Duffy and his brother Pete lived about six or eight miles south. Bill Montcastle and Si Dodder were east of our place four miles.

Across the Rock Springs draw, about a half mile away, was the Campsey place. The Campseys were bad and their friends were bad. They had belonged to the Quantrill Raiders during the Civil War and their place was a hangout for men of shady reputation. There were two brothers, Doc and John Ferber, who spent most of their time at the Campsey place, but the place belonged to Shannon Campsey and his three brothers, Jim, Jonce and Wyley.

Signals

We were right on the edge of the open range. Nearby were some limestone bluffs, full of rattlesnakes. We could climb on top of a bluff and see as far as the eye could reach. By putting up a red flag we could have a band of fifteen or twenty armed men in a very short time and more coming as fast as their horses could carry them.

Father was always on the lookout for all signals. He would come into the house, put on his gun belt, take down his rifle, and in his quiet way he would say to Mother, “There is a meeting, Lizzie.” Then he would kiss her and us children and ride away to the gathering place and Mother would go into the bedroom and kneel by the bed and pray.

Two Factions

It was directly after the close of the Civil War and the country was sparsely settled at that time. Veterans of the Union and Confederate Armies were about equal in number among the settlers. There was still a lot of bitterness among them over the war and it was only natural that there were two different factions striving for control.

In Kansas after the Civil War, the Vigilantes, like the Vigilance Committees in all the Western states and territories, were organized to protect the citizens from a lawless element.

The Vigilantes were made up of Union men and a few hired gunmen, and were under the command of a Northern man named Mose Beaman. Beaman, during the war, had been one of the Jennings Red Legs, a regiment of Jayhawkers in the Union Army, who saw service along the Kansas and Missouri line.

On the other side were the Regulators, armed men organized in some of the Southern states and along the border states, to obstruct the activities of the freedmen’s organizations. They usually rode at night, sometimes in disguise. They were a sort of forerunner of the Ku Klux Klan, but they were not well organized and lacked a definite aim. The Regulators were composed of Southern men and some hired gunmen, and were led by Si Dodder. They had been able to get some of their men elected to office and were having things pretty much their own way—so it was a bad situation.

Si Dodder had a habit of stealing some of the horses and cattle from the emigrant trains that were camped in his neighborhood. He would hide them; then collect a reward for finding them. When he drove them back to the owners and they paid the reward, he would turn some of their other stock loose, later demanding damages because they ran over his hay land. There was a lot of travel and he was doing fairly well until the Vigilantes got on to it and started watching him.

The Bullwhacker

One day a young man driving three yoke of oxen camped at the spring by the side of the road. He had made a fire of dead sunflowers and dried cow chips and was cooking his dinner when Si Dodder came by and tried to scare his cattle but they were chained to the wheels of the big wagon and could not break away. The bullwhacker grabbed his whip and nearly whipped Si Dodder to death.

Just then some of Si’s men came along and took him home and swore out a warrant for the bullwhacker. They took him up before old man Wadsworth, who was Justice of the Peace and also one of Si’s strongest henchmen, with instructions to fine him—his wagon and three yoke of oxen.

Violence

Mother had gone to Mrs. Saffles’s as midwife and Father was down in the orchard hoeing weeds out of the gooseberries. I was trying to catch a gopher and had him in a hole, when Mose Beaman and about a dozen other mounted men came riding up in a hurry.

“Get your horse and guns, Frank,” he called to my father. “The Vigilantes are riding!”

Father looked at me. “What shall I do with the boy? Can’t leave him here alone.”

“Never mind,” says Mose, “hand him up here and we will begin his education right now!” Father swung me up to Mose who put me down behind him and told me to hang on.

Father had his horse ready and in a few minutes he came out of the house with his rifle, bucklin...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• DEDICATION
• 1-THE NEW HOME
• 2-TRAGEDY
• 3-GROWING UP
• 4-LIGHTNING ON THE DRAW
• 5-ON THE TRAIL
• 6-THE LIGHTHORSE
• 7-STOLEN CATTLE AND DEAD MEN
• 8-THE MATERIAL AT HAND
• 9-MY FIRST WARRANT
• 10-BUD WELLS
• 11-THE BIG DRIVE
• 12-HOLY MOTHER, PRAY FOR US
• 13-GRAY HORSE STATION
• 14-THE LAST MAN. . .
• 15-ROLLA GOODNIGHT
• 16-THE FAMOUS GOODNIGHT BLUFF
• 17-INDIAN TERRITORY
• 18-TIME CATCHES UP
• 19-OLD OKLAHOMA
• 20-THE END OF AN ERA