Guns of Outlaws: Weapons of the American Bad Man

By Gerry Souter and Janet Souter

"Chronicles the misdeeds of many of America's worst miscreants, with special emphasis on the tools of the outlaw trade." —American Rifleman

From colonial-era rifles carried on the "Owlhoot Trail" to John Dillinger's Colt pistols, the history of the American outlaw is told in guns—weapons that became each man's personal signature. Authors Gerry and Janet Souter peer into these criminals' choices of derringers, revolvers, shotguns, rifles, machine guns, and curious hybrids, giving us a glimpse into the minds behind the trigger fingers. With over 200 illustrations, Guns of Outlaws gives a unique look at the lives and the hardware of the most infamous outlaws in American history, and of the law enforcement officers who hunted them.


As settlers moved further west, away from authority and soft city life into the Great Plains, the push for survival through the endless prairies and jagged isolating mountain ranges bred ruthless men. Most outlaws were technology freaks who seized upon the latest weapon innovations developed in the industrious East to provide an edge in the life-and-death cosmos of the Wild West. By the late 1930s and early 1940s, outlaws on horseback had given way to marauding bank robbers. Using fast cars and faster guns, they became folk heroes of the Great Depression, even as the law was hard on their tails.


"Historians Gerry and Janet Souter take the reader back to a time between 1840 and 1940 when . . . outlaws and man hunters lived bold and died hard . . . [The] book show[s] actual tools of the trade wielded during a violent century, bound up in a mix of hard truths and mythology." —Ammoland.com

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9781627885423

Gerry Souter

Gerry has lived in the Chicago area nearly all his life. His background includes over thirty years' involvement with aviation; he has flown in balloons, jet fighters and single-engine planes and has written about Canadian bush pilots, Arizona crop-dusters and Gulf of Mexico helicopter fleets. Janet Souter shares her husband Gerry's interest in history. She is president of their company, Avril 1 Group, Inc., and edits all of their joint copy. Janet has joined Gerry in balloon, helicopter and light aircraft flights. They are authors of over forty books, histories, biographies and young adult nonfiction. Their most recent book, written for The History Press, is titled Arlington Heights: A Brief History.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

THE OUTLAWS ARRIVE

Choose Your Weapon

IN THE NINETEENTH century, striking out to find a new start, a new life, or a new chance to grow beyond the bounds of society, which for many people rarely extended more than a hundred miles from a person’s place of birth, was no less daunting than traveling to Mars. And what was the third most important thing that went into that wagon bed after the family Bible and mother’s tea set? In most cases, it was a double-barreled shotgun. The shotgun was the gun that tamed the West. Nothing fancy, just a fist full of double-ought buckshot to put a jackrabbit in the stew pot, or a get-along tickle of rock salt to discourage unlawful attentions toward the family’s best milk cow by four-legged critters—or two-legged thieves. It protected the flow of treasure and commerce that built towns and empires. In the hands of the law, the shotgun meant business. Held hip-high by an outlaw, it was business.

This six-gauge double-barreled breech-loading shotgun was designed for meat hunters to shoot into flocks of geese, partridge, and other game. Scatterguns were perfect for shooters with minimum practice. Rock Island Auction Company

Almost nobody today uses the term outlaw in reference to lawbreakers. Outlaws originated in Britain as far back as when people formed settlements for crop raising and protection. Anyone who stole, or murdered his neighbor, or committed treasonous acts was considered outside the law, and anyone in the village, or town who aided this person—or even failed to report his whereabouts—was lumped into the arrest warrant when a posse comitatus (Latin phrase: Law of the country, or any males over the age of fifteen that a sheriff may conscript for their vigilance) was formed to hunt him (or her) down. That was the beginning of vigilante justice, which came over to the American colonies on the boat with the earliest English immigrants and the rest of their laws and customs.¹

THE FLINTLOCK

The flintlock was the natural evolution of the original Chinese fire stick, in which flame applied to compressed gunpowder caused an explosion, or rapid gas expansion, that then propelled a missile. Producing the flame was the trick. The later matchlock (or arquebus) required a cord tip saturated with saltpeter that was thrust, smoldering, into the gunpowder chamber through a touch hole. The next mechanical solution was the wheellock, which used spring-driven clockworks to spin a rough wheel against a flint to produce sparks. Finally, the gun mechanics produced an ignition spark by striking a flint against a small steel striker plate in the Dutch snaphaunce. Refining that concept created the flintlock.

Preparing the flintlock for discharge requires a measured quantity of coarse (corned) gunpowder poured down the musket’s or pistol’s barrel followed by a ball of slightly smaller diameter than the barrel’s bore. The ball is wrapped in a greased linsey or cotton patch to hold it in the barrel and rammed down on top of the gunpowder charge with a ramrod that is then replaced in its ferrules beneath the barrel. A small pan at the foot of the striker plate, or frizzen, is filled with finer ground ignition gunpowder that is protected from wind or wet by a sliding panel. Thumbing the hammer (doghead) to full cock opens the pan. The tricker (trigger) is tripped with the forefinger.

The flint sweeps down, striking the frizzen and sends sparks into the priming pan, which ignites a plume of flame that squirts down into the gun powder through a touch hole. This flame ignites the powder in the barrel and the gun fires its ball, or whatever load is rammed on top of the powder. Preloaded cartridges carrying the correct powder load, ball, and patch were carried in a wood and leather box on the belt. Each cartridge was torn open, poured into the muzzle, and rammed down. The primer powder, carried in a horn or flask in a pouch or on a thong around the neck, was poured into the open pan, which was closed until ready for firing.

To fire rapidly, the rifleman tap-loads his weapon, foregoing the patch and dumping the ball down the barrel, settling it against the gunpowder by firmly tapping the gun butt against the ground and using the coarse gunpowder for both priming pan and propellant charge. This rough handling ruins accuracy and fouls the mechanism in a short time with unburned powder residue. In an emergency, however, an expert rifleman can fire four shots a minute, filling a battlefield with a hail of gunfire.²

The wheellock pistol (called a dag) was a handful with all of its wood and brass furniture besides the wound-spring clockworks mechanism that spun steel teeth against a flint to produce sparks. The ball-ended grip made a dandy club. Rock Island Auction Company

The early outlaw arsenal ranged upward from the cudgel and garrote to the double-edged knife and ultimately to the flintlock pistol. During the revolution, it was a while before the Continental army began to police the vicious gangs that held open season on friends of the king, or Tories (the Tories had their own gangs as well). With colonial justice itself barely fleeing the British rope from village to town, convening courts of judgment posed a problem. As with most insurgencies, telling the zealous patriots apart from the cut-purse killers was difficult.

The flash and flame of the flintlock pistol made it the prestige weapon of choice during the Revolutionary War, even if its short barrel reduced accuracy to a handful of paces—or about forty feet. This inaccuracy in sets of dueling pistols virtually guaranteed—depending upon the distance marched off—the survival of one or both parties. Flintlock pistols were also expensive as most were made from imported parts, and they required an elaborate collection of accessories to load and clean them, which also made them slow to operate.

A bullion wagon from Deadwood, South Dakota, carrying $250,000 in gold from the Homestead mine is guarded with a formidable battery of Winchester repeating shotguns. Library of Congress

Highwayman makes an escape, discharging his pistols at pursuers. Successful thieves stole enough gold to afford firearms, while footpads stayed with knives and cudgels. Wikimedia Commons

A 1700 French flintlock pistol with elaborate wood and brass furniture gilding the functioning firearm—a gentleman’s gun. Rock Island Auction Company

When Gen. George Washington first laid eyes on his army in 1775, crowding into Boston to shame the Redcoats who had retreated to their ships in Boston Harbor, he almost called it quits and galloped back to Mount Vernon. Though eager and anxious to fight, the majority of the men in the scattered militias who reported for duty couldn’t hit the ground with their hats when it came to musket marksmanship. Most were not the flinty-eyed deerstalkers of American lore, the riflemen of the deep woods who could cut the mark at four hundred yards. This milling mob was a cross-section of the coastal and inland villages: clerks, tinkers, coopers, mercantile men, and business men. Farmers shouldered their antique fowling pieces. Some showed up wielding eight-foot pikes and Native American tomahawks.

As Washington had to face the most feared army in all Europe, filled with rank on rank of Seven Years’ War veterans, with nothing but this brave, well-meaning rabble who might bolt at the first thunderous scourge of the drums or the gleam of bayonets, he needed an edge. He chose buck and ball. This paper cartridge ammunition load contained a charge of powder, a .65-caliber ball, and three .31-caliber buckshot. The soldier bit off the powder end of the cartridge, poured some in the musket’s priming pan, and dumped the rest of the cartridge down the barrel. He counted on the paper wrapping wad to wedge the slightly smaller ball down against the powder and to reduce the exploding gas blow-by that cost the shot some of its power. In a smoothbore musket, the soldier could hope to hit a standing man at one hundred yards. For penetration, the buckshot proved effective at fifty yards, but at one hundred yards only raised a nasty welt.

A cased set of single-shot pistols with 1820–1830 percussion locks. A complete accessory set was needed to keep them in firing order. Rock Island Auction Company

Using the shoulder-to-shoulder, volley-fire-on-command combat of the eighteenth century, buck and ball increased the volume of lead poured downrange into enemy ranks. The British, however, were not amused. They considered this shotgun-type load to be an illegal war crime. In many cases, prisoners, or wounded caught with buck-and-ball loads in their cartridge box were summarily put to the bayonet.

Because the muzzle loading took so much time, the average shooter was held to two—possibly three—shots a minute, and then the ball went God-knows-where.³ A room, alley, or forest glade was suffused with a double blast of gun smoke from the flash pan and muzzle, allowing the shooter to affect an escape before his intended victim could locate him in the haze and reply in kind.

An X-ray of a flintlock rifle loaded with buck-and-ball ammunition showing the positions of the powder charge, ball, and buckshot before firing. Wikimedia Commons

While the flintlock may have been more dramatic, the most feared weapon, according to court records dealing with concealed weapons in the early nineteenth century, was the double-edge Bowie knife, or its fighting companion, the Arkansas toothpick. These twelve-inch fighting blades were worn in scabbards beneath the jacket and required considerable intestinal fortitude to wield, as the hot blood and vital fluids of one’s opponent sloshed about. However, its maintenance required only a session with a grinding stone once in a while and a dab of grease on the blade for quick retrieval and for easy withdrawal from a sucking wound.⁴

The tomahawk, or long-handled hand ax, was also popular in the wilderness. A prized Native American weapon, it was also useful as a camp tool. Some had a hollow handle and a pipe bowl opposite the ax blade for enjoying tobacco—or other herbs.

The single road agent, or highwayman, required at least two to three pistols arrayed in pockets or stuffed in the waistband. Large, so-called horse pistols were within easy reach, carried in holsters draped across the saddle’s pommel. Galloping about invited disaster if the vibrations loosened the missile in the barrel and a fast draw left the gunpowder and ball behind in the toe of the holster. The flintlock was oily, greasy, and flakey, ruined by damp and subject to ignition if dropped. Every part on it was made to fit, so field repairs were a problem without the tools of a gunsmith. And yet, flintlocks remained in use in the deep wilderness far into the nineteenth century, prized by Native Americans and valuable to the mountain men who lived and hunted far from white civilization.

A Bowie knife designed for fighting with a double-edge blade and brass hilt to parry an opponent’s slash. The heavy knives were carried in a leather scabbard for quick presentation. Designed by James Bowie, frontiersman and Texas patriot, who died at the Alamo. Rock Island Auction Company

Gunpowder can be made in the field from saltpeter (potassium nitrate), charcoal, and sulfur. To collect saltpeter, drink a bottle of rich grape wine, pee in a manure-filled drum with a bottom drain and filter, add water, and dry the mixture that drips out in open trays. Charcoal can be made from willow wood cooked in a can over a fire. Sulfur deposits occur near steaming underground springs.⁵ Raw lead has a low melting point (a campfire stimulated with a homemade, foot-powered bellows) and can be poured into a single or double handheld ball mold. Add a dash of antimony of tin to the lead and you have a ballistic stable bullet.

The tomahawk was a prized backup weapon in the era of single-shot rifles and pistols. The long handle gave leverage to a slash. It was a handy camp tool, and the hollow handle with a pipe bowl at the end allowed for smoking tobacco or other herbs. Rock Island Auction Company

Only the invention of the percussion cap saved the outlaw trade from these messy flintlocks. A Scottish clergyman, Rev. Alexander Forsyth, enjoyed hunting, but was frustrated by the flintlock’s delay between the flash in the pan and the ignition of the powder in the barrel, which tipped off his marsh bird targets. To reduce that delay, after many experiments, he proposed a pellet of fulminate of mercury stuffed in a copper cap that, when struck by the triggered hammer, shot a squirt of flame down the gun’s touch hole into the powder chamber. The cap also served to keep the touchhole covered and weather-proof. A gun could be carried, ready to fire at any time—and the press-fit cap allowed practical multishot weapons that could be carried on the person.

From the time of his invention in 1807 through the first third of the nineteenth century, gun makers incorporated the reliable, percussion cap system into a variety of packages from heavy, bayoneted infantry rifles to tiny single shot pistols that fit neatly into a waistcoat pocket. However, the big news was the relatively small multishot handgun. Two- and four-barrel derringers became popular even as towns and villages in the East drew up ordinances against concealed weapons. Down South, among the planters and cavalier populations, the constant threat of a slave revolt and a perceived Scots-Irish tendency to short tempers over matters of honor demanded a personal arsenal.

The lack of accuracy beyond the length of a dining room or the width of a card table was overcome with sheer volume of firepower. A variety of pepperbox revolvers came on the market in the 1820s and 1830s, which provided from four to six or even eight shots from a single weapon. A road agent armed with a pair of six-shot pepperbox pistols could put up a terrific battle against a coach guard’s single-shot musketoon, or even the blast from a bell-muzzled blunderbuss. The pepperbox offered any number of barrels that rotated around a single axis, each with a percussion cap nipple. The effect was that of a half-dozen single-shot pistols arrayed in one weapon.

Three percussion caps found on a battlefield. The antique clay pipe stub is a size reference. Their crimped ends and soft copper or brass construction assured a trustworthy ignition when the hammer dropped. eBay

Allen and Thurber made a particularly efficient model where the trigger squeeze rotated the barrels and cocked the hammer. When a barrel aligned the rotating cap under the hammer, a lever released and the hammer dropped. The downside to the multibarrel solution was sympathetic detonation—one flaming shot triggered the powder in the adjoining barrel, which triggered the next barrels around the axis, accidently clearing away a table of card players besides the lad caught with an extra ace in his waistcoat pocket.

Of course, if it was your intention to clear out the whole cheating bunch of rascals, the perfect pistol for you was the duckfoot. One powder charge simultaneously ignited any number of barrels spread out like the fingers of a hand—or toes of a duck—and any sullen mob threat was instantly turned into garbage.

As the population rumbled westward, outlaws dogged the trails, setting up islands of sin and murder amid the vast lawless prairies and mountains. The government inadvertently helped these desperadoes, as it encouraged settlement to grow voters and to advance political agendas. The railroads needed profits from land sales, cattle, crops, minerals, and buffalo hides. Outlaws plucked these low-hanging fruits of progress while taking advantage of burgeoning firearms and blade technology to further their aims.

Some gents did not even wait for the guns of the revolution to cool down before they took up the outlaw trade. Tories who had been booted off their land by the new state governments, and others who had enjoyed easy pickings off the cooling corpses of battlefield dead of both sides, made an easy transition to outlawry. Every state was isolated by the new Articles of Confederation. The United States was still a patchwork quilt that included lands claimed by Spain, England, France, and Mexico with communications traveling at the speed of a trotting horse. Taking advantage of this chaos, many outlaws never crossed the Mississippi into the wilderness. The original thirteen colonies and adjoining territories had enough outlaw hunting grounds to go around.

A pepperbox pistol was the earliest successful form of the revolver, giving the shooter as many shots as practical in one handy gun. This model is a double action—barrels are rotated, hammer is raised and dropped—all with one squeeze of the trigger. Rock Island Auction Company

For intentional chaos across the poker table, or on the quarter deck of a ship in riot, nothing calms a crowd like a duckfoot. These splayed barrels all ignite at once, producing a scene of horror and bloodshed with one tap of the trigger. Rock Island Auction Company

A bell-muzzle blunderbuss with an added bayonet. Usually used for defending a stagecoach or bullion run, the huge barrel was loaded with buckshot, nails, or whatever was available, and the extra-wide muzzle assured a wide dispersion of great pain and destruction. Rock Island Auction Company

CHAPTER 2

OUTLAWS OF THE NATCHEZ TRACE

IN THE EARLY nineteenth century, nearly every state had a rustic backwoods that sheltered outlaw bands. Originally a game trail blazed by bison in search of salt licks in the Nashville wilderness of Tennessee, the Natchez Trace became a trading highway for the Chickasaws and Choctaws. Before the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the trace was our earliest national road; called the Columbia Highway, it was a trade route leading into the West. As traffic volume grew, the military helped maintain the trace and the private inns and trading posts—called stands—along its length. Before steamboats began plying the Mississippi, western planters, slave traders, and farmers followed the trace north and east to sell their goods, and returned south and west with their earnings. National treasure flowed up and down the trace, but a wagon full of hides was less attractive to an outlaw than a purse heavy with gold.

THE HORRIBLE HARPES

The Wilderness Road snaked through dark and overgrown woods where, in the 1790s, travelers moved at their own peril when the horrible Harpes were about. These two brothers—savage, brutal Micajah (Big) and ferret-like Wiley (Little) Harpe—claimed this patch of Kentucky as their own hunting ground. Their father had been a Tory—a friend of the King—during the Revolutionary War and, in 1798, fled west for his life with his brood. The boys, having grown up surrounded by wartime hatred, decided working the soil for a pittance was less rewarding than burying their betters in the rich Kentucky loam. They became murderers who also stole travelers’ valuables.

Because they had no ready cash to start up their criminal enterprise, their initial weapon of choice was the tomahawk. During their early wandering years they spent time with the Cherokees, learning Native American woodcraft and the use of the tomahawk hand ax, decorated with carving and brass tacks, and sharp as a razor. They worked the road every day, appearing to be wayfarers, parsons, or woodsmen, looking for work, all the time sizing up their victims. There would be a distraction, a break for a roadside snack, passing the jug, a few laughs, and then one hard stroke with the tomahawk and it was done. They favored killing near a river where they slit the victim’s stomach open and filled his body with stones to sink it.

Taverns became great hunting grounds and kept the Harpes in money. They killed one man in the night just because he snored. One day, they offered up hard cash for a pair of loaded rifles from two men they had met and befriended. With the transaction complete, the Harpe boys shot the men, kept the rifles, and took back their money. Now, armed with modern flintlock rifles, they put aside all the pretense and playacting needed to get close enough to stab their victims, and just shot their unfortunate targets from ambush.

Hired coaches were particularly rich targets for outlaws’ depredations. Witnesses left behind were a liability. Justice was final and sudden to captured thieves by local vigilantes. Severed heads were stuck on poles as warnings. Wikimedia Commons

Eventually, even in the vast Kentucky and Tennessee wilderness, the Harpes’ high body count aroused notice. They attempted to hide out in the outlaw sanctuary, the Cave-In-Rock on the Ohio River. The resident outlaws, con men, and cutthroats who called the cave home were brutal river pirates, luring heavily laden flatboats, pirogues, and canoes to their doom with promises of lodging and drink. Even these thieves and murderers could not stand the presence of this pair of savages and threw them out.

Cave-In-Rock is a natural cavern on the Illinois River that served the same function as other caves along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Besides providing shelter from the elements, they became havens for outlaws of every stripe and the last tragic stop for many travelers on the Natchez Trace. Illinois State Parks

The Harpes were captured and jailed, but escaped. A family living in a remote cabin gave them shelter. When the husband returned to his cabin the next day, he found it in flames, his wife savagely abused with her throat cut and his only child’s throat cut with the same knife. In a killing rage, the husband gathered a posse of neighbors and pursued the Harpes for days until they ran them to ground. A pursuer fired his flintlock at the fleeing Big Harpe and missed, but the ramrod stuck in its ferules beneath the barrel. Another posse member tossed over his primed and loaded rifle and the next shot went home, bringing down Big Harpe.⁶

The posse members argued that Big Harpe should stand trial, but crazed Harpe carried on about his murders and how he was put on earth to be the scourge of mankind. The posse held a final vote and determined that they would shoot him, but the grieving spouse would have none of it. He drew a large skinning knife and slowly sliced off Big Harpe’s large head, the brute finally breathing his last. The staring head was wedged in a tree crotch at a bend near the crossing at Robertson’s Lick and for years the spot was known as Harpe’s Head.⁷

Inns along the trace offered rest, relaxation, and robbery to wayfarers. Guides, grog, and gumbo were offered as services to travelers at a price before the steamboats began navigating the Ohio, Illinois, and Mississippi Rivers. Wikimedia Commons

JOSEPH THOMPSON HARE

We took three hundred doubloons from one man, seventy-four pieces of different sizes and a large quantity of gold in bars. With the others, I found seven hundred doubloons and five silver dollars and four hundred French guineas and sixty-seven pieces the value of which I could not tell until I weighed them. I got $12,000 or $13,000 altogether from the company, all in gold.

Not a bad haul for the eighteenth century when a gold doubloon was almost a week’s wage for nonfarm labor. Joseph Hare was the opposite of the horrible Harpes. Instead of living rough like a beast in the cane breaks, Hare liked fine clothes, was well-armed on a good horse, and organized an efficient gang of cutthroats. He came from good Methodist stock, but decided early that stealing offered an adrenaline rush greater than working and thus became a pickpocket and cutpurse.

He kept ahead of colonial law by skipping back and forth across the border between Spanish and American Louisiana. His first road agent attempt