Sudden Finish of a “Bad Man’s” Reign.
In the early spring of 1877 the then wild-and-woolly little mining city of Joplin, Mo., began to hear rumors of a great find of shallow lead on the banks of Creek, just across the State line in Kansas. Short is a little stream that rises in the western part of Jasper County, Missouri, and, after meandering around a few miles, empties into Spring River, in the eastern part of Cherokee County, Kansas.
The new discovery of lead was on this stream some nine miles from Joplin. At that time zinc mining was still in its infancy. In fact, there were thousands of tons of high-grade zinc ore, which, under the name of “black jack,” had been thrown out from the lead with which it mingled and lay in the old dumps of the region. But the new strike was of lead only, and shallow lead was the one thing sought after by the miners of those days.
Then there followed a “stampede” worthy to be classed with those we have read about as occurring in the gold fields. One year from that day there was on that ground a thriving little city that claimed a population of 5,000 people.
There flocked in every blackleg and professional “bad[{56}] man” from a wide section of country. Gambling of all grades flourished unchecked in the broad light of day. Half the buildings were saloons, and a large share of the other half were brothels. The crooked little trail along which the buildings of the place were scattered was very appropriately dubbed “Red-hot Street” by the miners, and it played fully up to its name for many weeks.
Naturally, such surroundings and conditions bred crime. There was quarreling, fighting, and bloodshed. One or two men dropped out of sight, but their disappearance caused hardly a ripple of inquiry. They were mostly of that sort who “die with their boots on,” and no one mourned their loss. Gradually the evil elements grew bolder, and under the lead of the bolder spirits among them, took advantage of the general disorder to rob and plunder at every opportunity.
At the head of these plunderers was one of those characters of whom we read in stories of wild Western life, and whose likeness we may still see exploited upon the screen of the moving pictures. He was a typical “bad man” of the Western mining country. A tall, finely formed fellow, with a handsome, dare-devil face. He wore his hair well down onto his shoulders, sported high-heeled, red-topped boots, “toted” a pair of big revolvers, and when under the influence of liquor, which was practically all the time, he was a dangerous man. The respectable element feared him and the coterie which followed his lead. But there was no organized authority to appeal to for protection, and nothing was done, while the gang went on their way unchecked and grew in insolence and outrage day by day.
This wild leader of a wild band called himself “Tiger Bill” and boasted loudly of the men he had killed in other places and as to the valiant things he proposed to do on Short Creek. But the men of the place were mostly too busy to pay any attention to the vaporings of Tiger Bill, and as time went on he waxed more truculent and boastful than ever.
But he was destined to meet disaster at the moment when his prestige was greatest, and from a source the very last that either the desperado himself or any one else would have thought capable of resistance to his will. Among the dozen or so plank sheds along Red-hot Street, that had up the name of “Restaurant,” was a rough box of a place presided over by a little German.
He was a meek-looking, pink-and-white little man, with weak eyes sheltered behind a pair of large spectacles. He was an industrious fellow, who attended strictly to his business, and whose only name, so far as we knew, was Gus.