Marshal Mart Duggan's Leadville: The Wildest Years, 1878 - 1890

By Robert V. Hunt Jr.

Eddie Foy, the famous vaudevillian who toured the West during the late 1800s, was qouted as saying that compared to Leadville, Colorado, Dodge City resembled a Sunday School. The 10,200 - foot high "Magic City" was one of the wildest mining camps of the era. This book is a semi-biographical history of Martin "Mart" Duggan, who was Leadville City marshal for two and nearly three terms before he met his end at the hands of gambling pals. But Leadville was also home to numerous other fascinating characters, not the least of whom was John Henry "Doc" Holliday, who had his last gunfight in Leadville in 1884.

They all came to Leadville: the confidence men, the gamblers, the stage robbers, and the "soiled doves" though they could have never known it at the time, being primarily concerned with survival, these individuals in their totality combined to create one of the most intriguing camps in the Wild West.

And the site of much of the action that made Leadville unique occurred on State Street, the half mile long stretch of gambling dens, saloons, and bawdy houses that rivaled any red light district then in existence.

Even today, when State Street has been renamed Second Street, one can imagine Mart Duggan, Doc Holliday, and Tombstone's Johnny Tyler, to name only a few walking westward from Harrison Avenue to the east-west mecca of State Street. Gazing upward they would see majestic Mount Massive directly in front of them. What a view! What a mining camp!

Marshal Mart Duggan's Leadville - the Wild West at its most fascinating.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Feb 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781698710297

Robert V. Hunt Jr.

The author, a resident of Colorado, volunteered for the Vietnam War draft in 1969. Following Basic Combat Training at Fort Campbell, Ky., he earned an 11B10 (Light Weapons Infantry) MOS at Fort Polk, La., aka “Tiger Land.” He served 13 months with the 8th U.S. Army in Korea, near the misnamed DMZ (demilitarized zone). Eleven months were with the 7th Infantry Division and two months were with the 2nd Infantry Division. He was honorably discharged in 1971 with the rank of E-S5.

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MARSHAL MART

DUGGAN’S LEADVILLE

THE WILDEST YEARS, 1878 - 1890

ROBERT V. HUNT JR.

©

Copyright 2022 Robert V. Hunt Jr.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any

means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,

without the written prior permission of the author.

ISBN: 978-1-6987-1030-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6987-1029-7 (e)

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Image%201.jpg

caption: State Street Leadville Colorado,

1880. Image source: CHS

Image%202.jpg

caption: Undated photo of Leadville Colorado Police

Department. Man in front row at far left is believed

to be Marshal Mart Duggan. Image source: CHS

CONTENTS

Marshal Mart Duggan’s Leadville:

The Wildest Years, 1878-1890

CHAPTER 1       The Early Years

CHAPTER 2       The New Marshal

CHAPTER 3       Policing The Police

CHAPTER 4       Lynch Law and The Murder of Little Joe Marran

CHAPTER 5       Back on The Job

CHAPTER 6       Election Night Murder

CHAPTER 7       The Shooting of Lewis Lamb

CHAPTER 8       Leadville’s Carnival of Crime

CHAPTER 9       Wild Days and Nights

CHAPTER 10     Hell Let Loose

CHAPTER 11     Leadville’s Social Evil

CHAPTER 12     Perils of The Road

CHAPTER 13     Doc Holliday, John Tyler and C. C. Joy

CHAPTER 14     Doc Holliday’s Leadville Gunplay

CHAPTER 15     Doc Holliday on Trial

CHAPTER 16     Mart Duggan’s Quiet Years

CHAPTER 17     Bailey Youngson: Mart Duggan’s Erstwhile Friend

CHAPTER 18     Mart’s Last Days

Endnotes

Supplemental Bibliography

MARSHAL MART

DUGGAN’S LEADVILLE:

THE WILDEST YEARS, 1878-1890

Eddie Foy, the famous vaudevillian who toured the West during the 1880s, was quoted as saying that compared to Leadville Colorado, Dodge City, Kansas, resembled a Sunday school. Perhaps he exaggerated a bit, but the 10,200-foot-high Magic City rivaled any cattle town or mining camp in the era for flat-out bad temper.

This book is in part a biography of Martin J. Mart Duggan, Leadville’s city marshal for two and nearly three terms before meeting an untimely end at the hands of his gambling pals. But Leadville was also home to numerous other fascinating characters—male and female—not the least of whom was John Henry Doc Holliday, who had his gunfight in Leadville in 1884.

They all came to Leadville: confidence men, gamblers, footpads, stage robbers, and a plenitude of soiled doves. Though they never could have known it at the time—being primarily concerned with day-to-day survival—these individuals in their totality combined to create one of the most intriguing environments in the Wild West.

And the site of much of the action occurred on the State Street—a half-mile-long stretch of dance halls, gambling dens, saloons and bawdy houses that rivaled any red light district then in existence.

Even today, when State Street has been renamed Second Street, one can imagine Mart Duggan, Bat Masterson, Luke Short, Jesse James, Bob Ford, Doc Holliday and Tombstone’s John Tyler, to name only a few, walking westward from Harrison Avenue to the east-west mecca of State Street. Gazing upwards they would see majestic Mount Massive directly to the front. What a view! What a mining camp!

Marshal Mart Duggan’s Leadville—the Wild West at its most fascinating.

ONE

The Early Years

Martin James Duggan was born 10 November 1848, in County, Ireland. His parents, James and Mary Duggan, reared six children, four boys and two girls. Uprooted by the potato famine in the 1840s, the Duggan family immigrated to the United States and settled in Lakeville, western New York State. They then moved to Illinois, where they remained until 1856. Continuing west, they crossed Iowa and settled across the Missouri river near Floyd’s Bluff, Nebraska Territory.

According to the authoritative History of Leadville and Lake County, Colorado, by Don and Jean Griswold, in 1857 Mart and younger brother Tim were captured by Sioux Indians while watering a calf. They were held hostage for six weeks before being …rescued by a Mr. Traversey, who was married to a Sioux squaw. ¹

The 1860 census documented that the Duggan family had settled in Dakota County, Nebraska Territory. James, the patriarch of the clan, was 36-years-old, and his occupation was listed as farmer. Wife Mary was 33-years-old. Stephen, age 13; Martin, age 12; and Timothy, age 9, were all born in Ireland. One-year-old Thomas was born in Nebraska. After the family moved to Colorado in 1861, the first daughter, Kate, was born. ²

The elder Duggan staked claim to a ranch on the South Platte River southwest of Denver. And by the time he was 16, Mart, probably tiring of ranch life, worked a short stint as an employee of the Planter Hotel in Denver before moving briefly to Utah on his way to Montana. Once in the Big Sky country, Mart worked as a freighter, and earned a reputation as an expert bullwhacker. During one of his trips, Mart and his party were attacked by a band of Chief Red Cloud’s Sioux. In the ensuing fight, the Indians seemed to be getting the better of it until a detail of one hundred soldiers who came as an escort for the stage, arrived to save their bacon. ³

Although the details are lacking, young Mart apparently had more than his share of adventures in the wilds of Montana. Being a callow young fellow, and not finding steady employment, Mart at one point did not eat a solid meal for three straight days. Growing weak with hunger, he stopped at a restaurant and ordered a large meal. Unable to pay for it, he was unceremoniously chucked into the street, fortunate to get away in one piece.

Shortly thereafter he teamed up with another free spirit, and the two managed to survive the next few months by stealing pieces of mutton left hanging out at night by local butchers. On the verge of sliding permanently into the ranks of tough customers, Mart pulled up stakes again and went to Utah, signing on as a bronco-buster. Returning to Denver in 1867, Mart found work as a cowboy and then headed for the high country and drove a team hauling quartz in the Central City area. Next, he moved upcountry to Georgetown, where he worked as a bartender for his older brother Steve.

By 1870, Mart was likely hanging around the family homestead on the South Platte River. That was the year his name first appeared in print. It was in connection with a To Whom It May Concern notice in the 9 October 1870, issue of the Rocky Mountain News. Signed by fifty-five men, including James and Martin Duggan, the notice was inspired by the lynching of a man named James O’Neal, who fell into the hands of vigilantes. He was found hanged at a place called Brown’s Bridge on the lower South Platte River. Attached to the body of the 40-year-old Irishman was a note that read: CATTLE THIEF … If Sam Morgan and his outfit know what is good for them, he will leave the country in ten days. It was signed VIGILANCE COMMITTEE. Details of the lynching and subsequent arrest of two murder suspects are recounted in Dave Cook’s famous book, Hands Up, published about 1923. But whatever the relationship James and Mart Duggan had with James O’Neal, they felt strong enough about the hanging to demand that justice be served. ⁴

Though circumstances dictated that James Duggan would never achieve the notoriety of his son, he was nonetheless a courageous man and as such was a member of a posse that tracked down three murder suspects who escaped the Denver city jail and made their way southeast to Kiowa, Elbert County. According to the Boulder County News edition of 13 August 1875, A scouting party, with James Duggan in the lead, set up an ambush ad killed two of the three escapees at a corral along Cherry Creek.

As for Mart, he was said to have participated in a fatal gunfight at Georgetown, Colorado, in 1876. But a careful perusal of available records indicate that no such event occurred. No court records list anyone named Duggan as being charged with a killing, and Western newspapers of the time rarely failed to provide detailed coverage of homicides, particularly if they occurred in their own backyard.

More likely in 1876, the lure of Black Hills gold proved strong, and Mart found himself in Custer City, Dakota Territory, and there opened and dealt the first taro game established in that wicked region. ⁵ But soon on the road again, Mart stopped briefly at Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory, but then headed back to Colorado, surfacing in Del Norte in the far southwester part of the state. There, he cut timber for the mines, before getting the itch to find his own bonanza. Traveling to the wilds of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, he was attacked by hostile Indians, with Mart barely saving his scalp. ⁶

These tales, no doubt many apocryphal, found their way into print by the time Mart was the marshal of Leadville. Though they helped embellish his reputation as a gunfighter—a reputation that actually needed little help—they were primarily intended to titillate readers of dime novels, who even in the 1870s and 1880s devoured the outlandish adventures of Buffalo Bill, Wild Bill, Pawnee Bill, and a host of other characters, real or imagined. By the 1870s Mart had grown to be a man of average height, but with a barrel chest and blacksmith’s arms. He had a fine-featured Irish face, complemented by light color hair and blue eyes. His ready smile won him many male companions and female admirers. As a contemporary described him, he was a man that you would look at twice as you first met him. ⁷

While Mart Duggan was attaining manhood, in 1877 a small band of fortune-seekers had settled in California Gulch, west of the Mosquito Mountains in the central Colorado Rockies. Though the area had been mined for gold as early as 1860, the gold mines soon played out and the area was more or less abandoned for almost two decades. As the Leadville Daily Chronicle wrote in 1879, it was May 8, 1877, that George Harris stumbled upon the site of Leadville. He was the first settler, his wife for the first white woman. It was as lonely as wilderness of stunted mountain pine shot up from bold barren soil, between ugly boulders and craggy rocks that could be made. ⁸

On a frigid January day in 1878, a group met and somebody suggested the unglamorous but descriptive name Leadville be adopted. The new settlement would eventually be called the carbonate came from the wealth produced by the combination of silver and lead mined. The first permanent building was erected by Charles Mater in June 1878; he had arrived from Granite hauling a load of groceries. Soon the camp contained 1,500 people, and according to the Leadville News, by the winter of 1879 it was known that a camp had been struck the like of which had not been seen since the palmy days of the Comstock… There was only one newspaper and one church, but the camp contained in excess of a hundred saloons. ⁹

By the time Mart Duggan first breathed the thin air of 10,200-foot Leadville, sometime in 1878, Horace W. Tabor, the current postmaster and owner of a general store, had been elected mayor and was on his way to becoming the state’s first millionaire thanks to staking two miners to a grubstake in what became the Little Pittsburg mine. The camp was already developing a reputation as a two-mile-high mecca of unfathomable wealth, and before Leadville’s mines played out in the early 20th century, millions of dollars of wealth would be extracted from the mountainous bonanzas.

From its earliest days, it became a magnet for some of the roughest characters on the frontier. And as the topography of California and Iowa gulches was transformed almost overnight from wilderness to wealth producing mines, the town fathers found themselves up to their collective ears in a legion of bad me and women. Wrote the Denver Times in 1882, In 1879, the town was wild. Everybody carried a gun. Not in the pocket, mind you, on the natural-born fool did, and he rarely lived to repent of it. The weapons were stuck in the belt, right hand for immediate action. As a consequence, rarely a day passed without a violent death. The Denver Republican also wrote of Leadville’s early days:

Immoral Leadville beyond a doubt is still is. Public morality and private virtue are not yet judged by the same standard which rules east of Missouri. Drinking saloons are crowded at the rate of a dozen a block along Harrison Avenue….And these alternate with faro banks and keno tables where downy-cheeked youths from the East try their luck alongside tough-faced prospectors and scouts in leather breeches and long curled hair tied with blue ribbons. Down the side streets are the haunts of mines, dance-saloons, concert halls and low variety theaters, where young girls fallen from once happy Eastern Homes endeavor to attract their brutish patrons by painted faces, shrill thin voices, immodesty of manner and airiness of attire most unsuited to an altitude of 10,000 feet. ¹⁰

Into this bacchanalian wilderness arose the need to control the criminal element growing more daring every day. The first city marshal was a man named Thomas Harris, elected in January 1878. He and two deputies served but three months before the city council sought a new man. That man was George O’Connor. He was born in Nova Scotia, Canada, in 1848; after spending several years in Maine, he arrived in Colorado in 1863, migrating to the mining camps of Clear Creek County. ¹¹

He first gained notoriety when the Georgetown Miner wrote that he arrived on horseback from Montezuma to Georgetown, and he was … the first horseman who ever passed over the route so late in the season. ¹² He was authorized to hire four policemen. He would need all the help he could muster, as daily the population grew, and the mild-mannered George O’Connor had little idea what fate had in store for him.

As it turned out, it was not only the criminal element he had to worry about. One of the deputies appointed to serve under Marshal Harris was a man named James M. Tex Bloodworth. A young man of average dimensions, he was known as an efficient if somewhat taciturn individual. Little was known about his early life, but rumors surfaced that perhaps his past was not untainted. But in the wilds of the Upper Arkansas River in 1878, few people pried deeply into the past of others.

After George O’Connor was appointed, Bloodworth remained one of the policeman. O’Connor had been on the job only briefly when he had cause to doubt the character of young Mr. Bloodworth. He quickly deduced that the latter was incompetent, untrustworthy, and given to dereliction of duty on a regular basis. The marshal decided to ask the city council at the next meeting to discharge him. The knowledge of this greatly incensed Bloodworth against the marshal who accused the latter of circulating reports to derogatory to his character as an officer and a citizen, and who openly boasted that for this and other things he would have revenge. ¹³

On the evening of 15 April 1878, Bloodworth went to Hall & Coleman’s saloon on Chestnut Street. His badge prominently displayed, he spent a good hour bucking the tiger at the faro table. Armed with at least two revolvers, and consuming several lunches for energy, he next proceeded to a dance hall, where he told a man named S. D. DeForrest that he had heard O’Connor was going to have him taken off the police force, and that the marshal was trying to pull a job on him. He warned that the thing had got to be settled tonight. ¹⁴

Bloodworth then went directly to Billy Nye’s saloon, also on Chestnut Street. Marshal O’Connor was standing at the bar quietly engaged in conversation, when his antagonist entered and walked directly to him. The latter remarked in a loud voice that any man who tries to run over me, gets off wrong, and if anyone says that I did so is a dirty s-n of a b---h. ¹⁵

O’Connor warned him not to use such language. A man named John Kennedy late testified that O’Connor took three steps toward Texas. Texas pulled from his pocket a pistol and fired three shots." The men were no more than five feet apart, and the mortally wounded O’Connor lunged and attempted to grab Bloodworth. ¹⁶

The murderer ran to the saloon door, whirled around and fired again at the now prostrated marshal, all the while eluding grasping hands that tried to stop him. One plucky fellow named Milburn grabbed Bloodworth by the tail of his coat, and attempted to hold him, but the latter wrenched free and turned to fire one more shot at the dying man. The affray lasted no more than half a minute, and if the streets had not beem clogged with hundreds of men, Bloodworth would almost certainly have been chased down and lynched. But the miscreant, who had planned his treachery well, jumped on a stolen horse and rode over 13,000-foot Maosquito Pass towards Fairplay, twenty miles distance.

Mayor Tabor, who happened to be walking through Leadville when the tragedy occurred, rushed to Nye’s saloon, … where the smoke from the policeman’s pistol circled around the ceiling. Tabor immediately offered a $600 reward for the arrest and return of the body of James Bloodworth.

And although possess were sent out in hot pursuit, Bloodworth managed to elude them all. A dispatch dated the next day quoted a Mr. Cunnigham to the effect that the murderer had been sighted at Platte Station, twenty-two miles east of Leadville. Boasting of his bloody deed as though his were a righteous act, he ate breakfast, fed the horse and attended to his firearms. By the way he is heavily armed and having two navy revolvers and a needle gun. Being a good shot it will be dangerous for his pursuers to come very near him. ¹⁷

The source said that it would be difficult to capture him, because he had crossed the Range, and thus had access to five different roads that led out of Colorado, with New Mexico in particular a convenient route of escape. He also provided more information about the man, noting that … in January of the present year, in a fracas with Alex Milner—he who shot and wounded the man at oro—Bloodworth snapped his pistol three times in the face of Alex, when it was forcible taken from him. ¹⁸

The Silver World, published in Lake City, quoted a dispatch from the Leadville Reveille (the camp’s first newspaper) whose source reported that Bloodworth likely killed a man in Texas, … and it is also charged that he killed a couple men in cold blood in the Dry Cimarron. It seems that Bloodworth formerly associated with the famed Allisons, whose killing exploits are familiar to the people of Trinidad and Southern Colorado, and his taste for human blood was doubtless acquired in that quarter. ¹⁹

The Silver World reported that Bloodworth made his across South park and stopped at a house near Buffalo Flats. He told his host about the killing of the marshal and indicated that he was in pursuit of the murdered. The man says that Bloodworth appeared at ease, that his face was white as a sheet, and that he talked incessantly. Meanwhile, Lake County Sheriff L. R. Tucker was hot his trail and that he was finally traced to a point about fifteen miles north of Canyon City known as ‘Hole in the ground,’ a rugged spot almost inaccessible for man or beast, and there the trail was lost. ²⁰

The Rocky Mountain News published a small article that claimed that authorities in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, had been notified of the shooting of Marshal O’Connor and were provided a description of Bloodworth. They believe him to be George W. Bell, who recently killed Charles E. Lee in that town. ²¹

Meantime a correspondent for the Times in Leadville put the whole affair in a different light. His source was Gilpin County Deputy Sheriff Andy McFarlane, who claimed to have witnessed the murder of Marshal O’Connor. McFarlane said O’Connor was rough and in with gamblers and other hard characters. He wanted to get rid of Bloodworth, and induced town officials to notify him that he would be replaced by a chum of O’Connor, a gambler named Mart Dugan (sic). According to McFarlane, at the time of the confrontation between O’Connor and Bloodworth, the former was in a dance hall with a vile woman on his knee. The correspondent offered that while the general sentiment condemns the murder, yet the sympathy of a portion of the public seems to incline to Bloodworth, who was good if not better man than the one murdered. ²² O’Connor had been in office exactly twenty-three days.

With his city marshal dead, Mayor Horace Tabor acted swiftly and named Mart Duggan to fill the position. Tabor wanted someone strong enough to deal with the toughs who streamed into Leadville. At a special meeting of the Board this morning, Mart Duggan was appointed town marshal at a salary of $125 per month, assisted by four policemen at $10 per month. ²³

TWO

The New Marshal

Immediately after I was appointed, Mart said in an interview years later, I received a written notice from the toughs to leave town and if I stayed 24 hours I would follow George O’Connor, paid no attention…. Leadville, he recalled, was not only full of thieves, thugs and desperate characters, but … shooting miners (who) were determined that no newcomer should have authority over them." ¹

A correspondent for the Rocky Mountain News wrote that The traditional desperado who bristles with revolvers and bowie-knives and who is continually sniffing for human blood … has not yet made his appearance, and if he should the chances are that he would be collared in less than half an hour by our worthy marshal, Mart Duggan, and set to work on the street. ²

Though the correspondent attempted to downplay the outlaw element in Leadville, the Georgetown Miner reported that on 26 October 1878, an assassin attempted to kill Marshal Mart Duggan, on the night of the 18th, but the latter caught the blade of a knife, and escaped with a badly cut hand. ³

In a similar vein, the Pueblo Daily Chieftain wrote that Leadville is getting bad. A barkeeper of the Senate Saloon, at Tom Kemp’s dance house, got into an altercation with a man named Lawrence Healy, and shot him on Monday a week ago, after which he made his escape. His name is Charles Gardner, and the authorities have offered a $200 reward for him dead or alive.

And the Denver Times quoted a Leadville newspaper to the effect that We regret very much that a certain class of people are flocking to our camp, namely: gamblers, many numbers of robbers, harlots, while houses of ill-fame, saloons and gambling hells are being built—everything that is base and destructive to morality and religion. This is nearest a ‘Sodom’ of any place in the state. ⁵

Leadville in 1878 had a population of about 2,000 persons, but given the growing criminal element, it was all that lawmen could do to keep a semblance of order. And given the hostile environment in which he labored, it was no surprise that Mart Duggan was viewed by some as a violent, mercurial man, with a hair-trigger temper, feared by friend and foe alike. Indeed, one of the first men that the new marshal put in jail was August Rische, Tabor’s partner and one of the original Carbonate Kings. Rische, like much of the male population, found conviviality and relaxation at the town’s saloons. One day he got drunk, encountered Marshal Duggan and asked him to take a drink. The new marshal liked to drink as much as the next man, but after downing several glasses, the bon vivant turned sour. They quarreled over some triviality, and Duggan attempted to arrest Rische. When he resisted, Mart knocked him senseless and dragged him to the city jail, then located on Chestnut Street. After Mayor Tabor learned that his partner was jailed, he rushed over to remonstrate with the new marshal. The latter, still in bad humor, turned to Tabor and growled, Close your trap or you’ll be run in too. ⁶

In addition to being city marshal, Duggan also held the position of street commissioner and was empowered by the city council to remove squatters from the street and alleys that more and more demanded unfettered passage. A Rocky Mountain News correspondent wrote that The streets and alleys of Leadville are literally filled with the bones and carcasses of animals. Dressed in poultry, pig’s feet, soup-bones, dogs and cats, have been thrown into the alleys, and there they lie, waiting for warm spring days to make them steam with putridity…. ⁷

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Along with his other headaches, Mart was finding out, as had his predecessor, that his own men could give him almost as much trouble as the outlaw element. At a city council meeting in February 1879, he presented complaints against two of his force, whose badges he had taken off. Mart had to deal with the chronic problem of policemen getting drunk and succumbing to the all-too-pervasive temptations in the vice-tolerating camp. Meanwhile, a census conducted the next month revealed that Leadville had a population of 5,040, including 4,974 whites and 86 colored. ⁸

For whatever reasons, Mart soon demonstrated that his uncontrollable temper bode ill for his future as Leadville city marshal. He landed up to his neck in hot water when an employee of the Tontine saloon on Chestnut Street, a man named L. H. Beasey signed a formal complaint against him. Beasey, the night bartender, stated that on the evening of 25 February 1879, Duggan entered the Tontine and called for a drink. As Beasey set down his drink, Mart handed him in a silver coin commonly called a trade dollar. The trade dollar was normally discounted twenty-five percent. When Beasey returned his change, Mart demanded the full amount. The bartender demurred, and told him that he was only following his employer’s orders. Beasey later stated that Duggan became enraged and very abusive, and drew his revolver and threatened to kill me. He added, He came behind the bar and knocked me down, called me all kinds of bad names, also denounced the proprietors as thieves and robbers, and using the worst epithets to me and my employers, all of which was done without cause or provocation on my part. ⁹

Mart was temporarily suspended, but was back on the job in early March—just in time to deal with another homicide. On the morning of the 10th, gunfire erupted on Harrison Avenue—the main north-south thoroughfare. Mortimer Arbuckle and Jim Bush had staked claim to the same piece of property. As was often the case when armed men argued, the temptation to pull the trigger was too great. When the dust cleared, Arbuckle lay dead on the ground, a bullet hole in his left eye socket.

Almost immediately several self-appointed rabble-rousers were on the scene and commenced ha-ranguing the crowd, hoping to instigate a lynching, mostly for their own entertainment. As the crowd, soon growing to an estimated