scarcely less dangerous, and of a few of these there may be made passing mention.
Joel Fowler was long considered a dangerous man. He was a ranch owner and cow man, but he came into the settlements often, and nearly always for the immediate purpose of getting drunk. In the latter condition he was always bloodthirsty and quarrelsome, and none could tell what or whom he might make the object of his attack. He was very insulting and overbearing, very noisy and obnoxious, the sort of desperado who makes unarmed men beg and compels "tenderfeet" to dance for his amusement. His birth and earlier life seem hidden by his later career, when, at about middle life, he lived in central New Mexico. He was accredited with killing about twenty men, but there may have been the usual exaggeration regarding this. His end came in 1884, at Socorro. He was arrested for killing his own ranch foreman, Jack Cale, a man who had befriended him and taken care of him in many a drunken orgy. He stabbed Cale as they stood at the bar in a saloon, and while every one thought he was unarmed. The law against carrying arms while in the settlements was then just beginning to be enforced; and, although it
was recognized as necessary for men to go armed while journeying across those wild and little settled plains, the danger of allowing six-shooters and whiskey to operate at the same time was generally recognized as well. If a man did not lay aside his guns on reaching a town, he was apt to be invited to do so by the sheriff or town marshal, as Joel had already been asked that evening.
Fowler's victim staggered to the door after he was stabbed and fell dead at the street, the act being seen by many. The law was allowed to take its course, and Fowler was tried and sentenced to be hanged. His lawyers took an appeal on a technicality and sent the case to the supreme court, where a long delay seemed inevitable. The jail was so bad that an expensive guard had to be maintained. At length, some of the citizens concluded that to hang Fowler was best for all concerned. They took him, mounted, to a spot some distance up the railroad, and there hanged him. Bill Howard, a negro section hand, was permitted by his section boss to make a coffin and bury Fowler, a matter which the Committee had neglected; and he says that he knows Fowler was buried there and left there for several years, near the
railway tracks. The usual story says that Fowler was hanged to a telegraph pole in town. At any rate, he was hanged, and a very wise and seemly thing it was.
Jesse Evans was another bad man of this date, a young fellow in his early twenties when he first came to the Pecos country, but good enough at gun work to make his services desirable. He was one of the very few men who did not fear Billy the Kid. He always said that the Kid might beat him with the Winchester, but that he feared no man living with the six-shooter. Evans came very near meeting an inglorious death. He and the notorious Tom Hill once held up an old German in a sheep camp near what is now Alamagordo, New Mexico. The old man did not know that they were bad men, and while they were looting his wagon, looking for the money he had in a box under the wagon seat, he slipped up and killed Tom Hill with his own gun, which had been left resting against a bush near by, nearly shooting Hill's spine out. Then he opened fire on Jesse, who was close by, shooting him twice, through the arm and through the lungs. The latter managed to get on his horse, bareback, and rode that night, wounded as he was, and
partly trailed by the blood from his lungs, sixty miles or more to the San Augustine mountains, where he holed up at a friendly ranch, later to be arrested by Constable Dave Wood, from the railway settlements. In default of better jurisdiction, he was taken to Fort Stanton, where he lay in the hospital until he got ready to escape, when he seems to have walked away. Evans and his brother, who was known as George Davis—the latter being the true name of both—then went down toward Pecos City and got into a fight with some rangers, who killed his brother on the spot and captured Jesse, who was confined in the Texas penitentiary for twenty years. He escaped and was returned; yet in the year 1882, when he should have been in the Texas prison, he is said to have been seen and recognized on the streets of Lincoln. Evans, or Davis, is said to have been a Texarkana man, and to have returned to his home soon after this, only to find his wife living with another man, and supposing her first husband dead. He did not tell the new husband of his presence, but took away with him his boy, whom he found now well grown. It was stated that he went to Arizona, and nothing more is known of him.
Tom Hill, the man above mentioned as killed by the sheep man, was a typical rough, dark, swarthy, low-browed, as loud-mouthed as he was ignorant. He was a braggart, but none the less a killer.
Charlie Bowdre is supposed to have been a Texas boy, as was Tom Hill. Bowdre had a little ranch on the Rio Ruidoso, twenty miles or so from Lincoln; but few of these restless characters did much farming. It was easier to steal cattle, and to eat beef free if one were hungry. Bowdre joined Billy the Kid's gang and turned outlaw for a trade. It was all over with his chances of settling down after that. He was a man who liked to talk of what he could do, and a very steady practicer with the six-shooter, with which weapon he was a good shot, or just good enough to get himself killed by sheriff Pat Garrett.