In October 1872, a man named Billy Brooks stepped off a stage into the raw, unfinished settlement of Dodge City, Kansas. The town had existed for barely a month, a scattering of frame buildings, tents, and adobe huts that served as a supply point for buffalo hunters and a rest stop for soldiers from nearby Fort Dodge. Violence was so routine that one saloon owner counted fifteen men killed there during that first winter alone; one of the town’s founders put the first-year death toll at twenty-five, with perhaps twice as many wounded. Dodge was not yet incorporated, and in the absence of organized law, businesses often hired gunmen to keep the peace.
The only legally authorized lawman in the region was Deputy Marshal Jack Bridges, and sometime in late 1872, he took on Billy Brooks as his assistant. Brooks was only twenty-three and already a man with a past. Born in Ohio in 1849, the eldest son of a blacksmith, he had left home as a teenager to hunt buffalo on the Kansas prairie, earning the nickname “Buffalo Bill” for his skill. By 1870 he was driving a stagecoach between Wichita and Eldorado, winning a reputation for courage and stamina that led to his appointment as town marshal of Newton, Kansas, in April 1872.
Newton was a rough place, still reeling from a bloody gunfight that had erupted months before his arrival, and Brooks soon proved his mettle. In early June, when a group of Texas cowboys threatened a saloon owner, Brooks talked two of them into leaving. As they mounted up, one turned and shot him in the shoulder. Instead of seeking a doctor, Brooks saddled a horse and gave chase, taking two more bullets in the pursuit, one passing through his right breast, before he finally turned back for treatment.
The wounds were serious enough to force his resignation. After a brief stint as a police officer in Ellsworth, he made his way to Dodge City. Locals stopped calling him Buffalo Bill and started calling him “Bully Billy. ” No record explains why, but it was not likely a compliment.
Brooks turned to gambling and partnered with a saloon keeper and gambler named Matt Sullivan, who ran a game in the Kelly and Hunt Dance Hall. In November, the two men tangled with a trio of cowboys over a dispute in the dance hall, reportedly stemming from a game of chance. Accounts differ on the details, but the outcome was clear: Sullivan cracked one cowboy across the head with his pistol, fracturing his skull and penetrating his brain. When a second cowboy aimed a revolver at Sullivan’s back, Brooks shot him in the head.
Sullivan spun around and shot the third cowboy in the jugular. One eyewitness claimed the cowboys had been trying to cheat the town and got no more than they deserved, and some accounts say they were only wounded. Either way, Billy Brooks was making a name for himself. A little over a month later, days before Christmas, Brooks killed a man named Brown in another gunfight.
Less than a week after that, Matt Sullivan was shot through a window and killed almost instantly. The Kansas Daily Commonwealth reported on December 31, 1872, that it was supposed the unknown assassin was a character called Bully Brooks, though nothing definite was known and no charges were ever brought. A few months afterward, Brooks came close to death himself when a buffalo hunter named Kirk Jordan, perhaps seeking revenge for a friend, caught sight of him across a street and raised a buffalo gun. A bystander stepped into his line of sight, forcing Jordan to adjust his aim, and Brooks managed to throw himself behind a water barrel and escape.
That proved to be the final straw for Dodge City’s prominent citizens. The next day, Brooks was put on an eastbound train. One of the town’s founders gave his verdict on the departure: “Good riddance for everybody. ”
Brooks returned to buffalo hunting, based out of a fortified cabin he built along Kiowa Creek in Comanche County, Kansas.
When he was not slaughtering bison, he was stealing horses, many of them from reservation Indians. In the early 1870s, white horse thieves systematically raided tribal pony herds across southern Kansas. Though the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1868 protected the tribes, the army looked the other way, and the raids continued almost unchecked. The natives retaliated by stealing horses from settlers, only for white thieves to do the same while disguised as Indians, sometimes even scalping their victims to shift the blame.
The resulting chaos along the frontier became one of the underlying causes of the Red River War, and Brooks was among the men raiding tribal herds with impunity. During this period he became acquainted with buffalo hunters like Bill Tilghman and Bat Masterson. At least once, Masterson and a companion were forced to take refuge in Brooks’ cabin after an attack by Cheyenne warriors. By early 1874, the region had descended into near-total lawlessness, and Brooks and his companion Matilda moved east to a dugout near Caldwell, Kansas.
Matilda had worked as a dance hall girl in Dodge City, took Brooks’ last name, and passed herself off as his wife, though historians doubt the couple was officially married. In Caldwell, Brooks went back to work for the Southwestern Stage Company, the same outfit he had driven for in 1870. The job was threatened when a rival business, Vail and Company, underbid Southwestern for the lucrative mail contract between Caldwell and Fort Sill. Without that contract, Southwestern would likely have to shut down its passenger service in the area.
Brooks and his coworkers devised a scheme to steal the rival company’s horses and mules, reasoning that without animals, Vail and Company could not deliver the mail. Around fifteen conspirators were involved, including a livery stable owner named Jud Calhoun, a young attorney named L. Ben Hasbrouck, a man named A. C.
McLean, and two notorious horse thieves, Hurricane Bill Martin and One-Armed Charlie Smith. By late June 1874 the scheme was in operation, and a horse and four mules disappeared from Vail and Company’s stables. The plot unraveled when McLean talked too freely to a local doctor, who went to the authorities. On July 27, 1874, warrants were issued for Brooks and several accomplices.
Sumner County Sheriff John Davis gathered a posse, while bands of vigilantes also scoured the countryside. One by one the suspects were rounded up: Hasbrouck was arrested in a cornfield, another man was taken at a friend’s house, and One-Armed Charlie was captured trying to flee south into Indian Territory. Only Billy Brooks refused to be taken quietly. He and Matilda holed up in their dugout, and Brooks announced he would not be taken alive.
A frontier veteran, he knew well the power and prevalence of lynch mobs, and he refused to trust the sheriff’s promises of protection and a fair trial. Matilda stood with him, reportedly holding a pistol in one hand and a knife in the other, urging him to fight off the posse or die together. The siege lasted for hours, until Brooks finally agreed to allow a man he knew, John Kirk, to come inside. Kirk, like the sheriff, promised safe transport to Caldwell.
Brooks agreed on one condition: he would keep his firearms. The request was granted, and Brooks emerged with two pistols at his hips and a Winchester in his hand, surrendering his arsenal only when he reached Caldwell. Immediately after, his supposed friend Kirk pistol-whipped him across the forehead. Brooks, furious, told Kirk he would kill him as soon as he got out of jail.
He never got the chance. Around midnight, the lynch mob Brooks had feared arrived, overpowered the guards, and hauled him and the other two prisoners to the Salt Creek bridge, about a mile outside town. All three were hanged by the neck until dead. Billy Brooks was twenty-five years old.
Later that day, officers took down the bodies and laid them out in the courthouse. Matilda came in and fell to the floor beside Billy, weeping as though her heart was ready to burst with grief. She purchased a coffin for the burial of the man she called her husband. The other two lynch victims were interred in simple wooden boxes.
There were very few people in Kansas who shared Matilda’s grief. Billy Brooks killed God only knows how many men, stole God only knows how many horses, and made God only knows how many enemies, some of whom may well have stood in that lynch mob. He and his companions were not necessarily hanged merely for stealing a few mules. They were hanged because they had lived as men who demanded to be killed, bullying and provoking others without regard for the consequences.
In the end, Billy Brooks got exactly what his manner of living had long been asking for.