THE END OF HIS ROPE
On the 19th-century frontier some men lived for justice, others died for it. Charlie Reed was among the latter, and thereon hangs a tale.
Little is known about Charlie’s past, aside from his reputed claim to have hailed from San Antonio, Texas. The 1870 census reveals a 30-year-old Irish-born soldier named Charles Reed serving at nearby Fort Concho. That Reed was honorably discharged from the 11th U.S. Infantry as a corporal in 1872 and was noted to be of good character. He could be our Charlie.
After his discharge Reed made his way to Fort Griffin and took up the trade of a cowboy, specifically as a drover pushing large cattle herds north to Kansas and Nebraska shipping points. He worked and lived northeast of town at the sprawling Millett Ranch, an outfit that prided itself on hiring tough hombres. Among them were future lawman John Selman, remembered as the man who killed gunman John Wesley Hardin, and an escaped convict calling himself Jack Lyons. Lyons’ birth name was James Riley, and he’d twice escaped from prison. In 1876 he’d shake the dust of Texas from his chaps and, under the alias David C. Middleton, join a cattle drive north. “Doc” Middleton would become an outlaw legend in Nebraska, where he and Reed would renew their acquaintance.
Meantime, Reed befriended William E. “Billy” Bland, a top hand who organized trail drives north to markets more lucrative than those in Reconstruction-era Texas. Charlie popped up at Fort McPherson, Neb., in the mid-1870s. In , a 1924 compilation of cowpunchers’ recollections, Millett hand L.B. Anderson recalled a stampede through that military garrison, which once stood on the south bank of the Platte River some 30 miles east of the rail town of North Platte. Reed was reported his killing of Ed McGivern, near Ogallala, some 50 miles west of North Platte, though the paper was scant on details. In his memoirs Dakota cattleman Ed Lemmon recalled that in 1874 or ’75 Bland and Reed were involved in a shootout at a saloon in Fort Scott, Kan., and Bland was killed. Though Lemmon was correct in the basics, he was off by a couple of years and had confused Fort Scott with Fort Griffin. It is in the latter town Reed first comes into historical focus.
