The only man Billy the Kid was ever said to fear was Dave Rudabaugh, a figure whose legend grew so thick that by the time of his death, he was remembered as a gunfighter who taught Doc Holliday how to shoot and a killer of dozens of men. Most of that reputation does not survive contact with the historical record. Rudabaugh was real, but he was not quite the demon the stories made him out to be. He was a small-time outlaw who happened to cross paths with some of the most famous men of the American West, and his life ended not in a blaze of glory but with his head carried through the streets of a Mexican town on a pike.
David Rudabaugh was born in Illinois on July 14, 1854. His father served with the Union Army but disappeared shortly after mustering out in 1863, and the family eventually settled in Kansas. Little else is known about his early years. Stories that he began his criminal career as a bandit in Arkansas, or that he robbed stagecoaches in the Black Hills, have no basis in any documented evidence.
By 1875, the twenty-one-year-old was still living with his mother in Greenwood County, Kansas. His first confirmed crime did not occur until January 27, 1878, when he and a few companions tried to rob a westbound train at Kinsley, Kansas. The attempt failed miserably, and they walked away empty-handed. A month later, Rudabaugh was in the custody of Ford County Sheriff Bat Masterson.
His accomplices were also apprehended, and after a failed jailbreak attempt, they were sentenced to hard time at Leavenworth. All of them except Rudabaugh, who cut a deal with the prosecution and testified against his former partners. This pattern of self-preservation would repeat itself throughout his life. Every time he was arrested, he confessed, and more often than not, it worked in his favor.
After his release, Rudabaugh spent time in Dodge City, where he told a local paper he was looking for work and intended to earn his living on the square. Five months later, he and two companions held up a stagecoach a few miles south of Las Vegas, New Mexico. There is no evidence to support the claim that he took part in the Royal Gorge War, the armed conflict between railroads fighting over track rights through Colorado’s Royal Gorge. There is also no proof that he gave shooting lessons to Doc Holliday.
Rudabaugh certainly knew Holliday in Kansas and later in New Mexico, but the stories of his teaching the famous gambler how to handle a gun appear to have originated with a Catholic priest turned historian named Frazier Hunt, whose book on Rudabaugh contained numerous errors that were repeated as fact by later writers. Rudabaugh arrived in Las Vegas, New Mexico, in the late 1870s, a town described by historian Ralph Emerson Twitchell as one that harbored a more disreputable gang of desperadoes and outlaws than any other. The town was firmly controlled by Hoodoo Brown, a Missouri-born gambler who had conned his way into becoming mayor, coroner, and justice of the peace. His friend J.
J. Webb, a former Ford County deputy, was the town marshal, and Mysterious Dave Mather served as one of his deputies. Rudabaugh soon joined the ranks as a Las Vegas constable. On August 14, 1879, Rudabaugh and two companions, including fellow deputy Joe Carson, robbed a stage just outside of town.
They were arrested, but the charges were mysteriously dropped. Three other men were falsely convicted and sentenced to prison. Carson himself was gunned down five months later after accusing some Texas cowboys of stealing a buggy. The cowboys located him at a Las Vegas dance hall, and a gunfight erupted that left Carson dead, riddled by at least eight bullets.
Two of his attackers escaped but were soon caught by Rudabaugh and thrown into jail. A couple of nights later, a lynch mob came and hanged one of the prisoners from a windmill while the other two were shot full of bullets. On March 9, 1880, another deadly incident shook Las Vegas. According to the Dodge City Globe, three intoxicated and heavily armed men entered a saloon and became boisterous.
Marshal Webb ordered them to leave, and one of them, a freight driver named Mike Kellar, refused and drew his pistol. Webb shot him three times, killing him. The official story was that Webb acted in self-defense, but Kellar had just arrived from South Dakota with over $2,000 on his person, money that mysteriously disappeared when Mayor Hoodoo Brown skipped town. Webb was arrested, tried, found guilty of murder, and sentenced to hang.
Rudabaugh attempted to bust Webb out of jail on April 2, 1880. Accompanied by an inebriated friend named John Allen, Rudabaugh visited Webb under the pretense of bringing tobacco and newspapers. Allen pulled out a six-shooter and gunned down the jailer, Antonio Leno Valdez, then grabbed the keys and tossed them to Webb. Webb refused to unlock the cell, apparently trusting his lawyers to win an appeal.
Rudabaugh and Allen fled, with Rudabaugh heading to Fort Sumner and Allen to an early grave. According to the Las Vegas Optic, Allen, sick and crippled with rheumatism, begged Rudabaugh to kill him. Rudabaugh eventually put a pistol to Allen’s head, blew his brains out, and buried him by the roadside. At Fort Sumner, Rudabaugh joined up with Billy the Kid.
By late 1880, the Kid was being hunted not only by a posse of gunmen from Texas but also by his old friend, newly elected Lincoln County Sheriff Pat Garrett. In October, Rudabaugh, Tom Pickett, and Billy Wilson robbed a buckboard a few miles north of Fort Sumner, with the crime committed in their underwear to avoid being identified. The Kid was not involved in that particular robbery. A month later, Rudabaugh and the others made off with a herd of horses belonging to a local priest, and the bandits were spotted by a posse at Coyote Springs.
A brief firefight ensued in which only horses were killed, and the outlaws escaped on foot. The posse found them again at the Grzelachowski ranch house outside White Oaks. A deputy delivered a note demanding surrender, and the outlaws laughed at the idea, sending back a demand to know who led the posse. Deputy William Hudgin sent James Carlile inside to negotiate, and Carlile was taken hostage and forced to drink whiskey until he was stumbling drunk.
When the posse threatened to kill the ranch owner, James Greathouse, if the outlaws did not surrender, a nervous deputy accidentally discharged his firearm. Carlile dove headfirst through a window and was shot to pieces. To this day, no one can say for certain who killed him. Billy the Kid blamed the posse, and the posse blamed the Kid.
One deputy later claimed he heard Rudabaugh admit he was one of the shooters, but no evidence supports that claim. Pat Garrett had been making his own moves. He had led a posse in a sweep from Roswell to Fort Sumner, and while he failed to catch Rudabaugh or the Kid, he did arrest J. J.
Webb, who had escaped from jail in November after a change of heart. On November 25, 1880, Garrett arrested Webb, and less than a month later he headed back to Fort Sumner with another posse. Garrett turned some of the Kid’s acquaintances and had them spread word that he had left the area. The ruse worked.
Late on the evening of December 19, Garrett and his men heard horses approaching. When the outlaws came within range, Garrett called for them to halt, and Tom Fard instinctively reached for his pistol. The posse opened fire, hitting Fard in the chest. The Kid and the others turned their mounts and fled, with Rudabaugh’s wounded horse forcing him to ride double with Billy Wilson.
The outlaws took refuge in an old stone house near Stinking Springs. Garrett and his men surrounded the house under cover of darkness. Early the next morning, Charlie Bowdre emerged to feed the horses, and mistaking him for the Kid, Garrett ordered his men to fire. Bowdre was shot dead.
The posse then killed all the outlaws’ horses, and Garrett had supplies brought in so his men could cook breakfast. The smell of frying bacon drifted down to the stone house, and the outlaws decided a hot meal sounded better than a belly full of lead. Rudabaugh was the first to surrender, after Garrett promised not to hand him over to vigilantes in Las Vegas. He stepped out, followed by Wilson, Pickett, and finally Billy the Kid.
The prisoners were taken back to Las Vegas, where Rudabaugh faced the wrath of citizens still blaming him for the death of jailer Valdez. Garrett had to hold off a lynch mob that night and again the next morning as the prisoners boarded a train for Santa Fe. Billy the Kid was eventually transferred to Mesilla, found guilty of murder, and sent to Lincoln to await the hangman. Rudabaugh readily admitted to the stagecoach robberies and was sentenced to life in prison, but the court suspended his sentence so he could face trial in Las Vegas for the murder of Valdez.
He was certain he would be lynched. He even tried digging his way out of jail but was snitched on by another inmate. He told the Santa Fe New Mexican that he was gone once he left for Las Vegas, that they would murder him just as sure as he went. The Las Vegas Daily Optic described him as poor in flesh, weighing twenty pounds less than he had a year before, a doomed and chained culprit.
As it turned out, Rudabaugh had nothing to worry about. He was not assassinated, and his lawyers secured a change of venue, returning him to the safety of the Santa Fe jail. He was tried and found guilty of Valdez’s murder, a crime he most likely did not commit, since it was John Allen who pulled the trigger. The judge failed to properly instruct the jury on the requirements for a first-degree murder conviction, and there was reasonable doubt as to premeditation, but Rudabaugh was sentenced to hang.
His lawyers filed an appeal, and the Supreme Court was scheduled to hear the case in January of 1882. Rudabaugh did not wait for the court’s decision. On the morning of September 19, 1881, he picked the lock on his cell with a piece of wire. Instead of simply walking out, he called out the jailer’s name and woke him up.
Despite having a loaded revolver, he was overpowered and disarmed. He later claimed he had hidden the pistol in his cell for over a month. Two and a half months later, on December 3, 1881, he tried again and succeeded. He and five other inmates, including J.
J. Webb, tunneled under the walls to freedom. Webb made his way to Arkansas under an assumed name and died of smallpox a few months later. Legend says Rudabaugh fled to Tombstone and joined up with Curly Bill Brocius and the Cowboys, and some claim he was behind the shootings of Morgan and Virgil Earp.
The only evidence comes from a letter written by attorney Edward P. Curn, who claimed Wyatt Earp had seen Rudabaugh among the men who attempted to assassinate his brother Virgil. Aside from that brief secondhand report, there is no evidence Rudabaugh was ever in Tombstone. Most historians agree he instead sought refuge in Mexico.
He spoke with reporters in Chihuahua in early 1883, and by 1884 he was reported to have been seen in El Paso, described as a young man with long, curly black hair and a neatly trimmed mustache, dressed in the richest possible fashion. A range detective bumped into him in Mexico in November 1884 and found him running a saloon in the town of Parral. After that, Rudabaugh worked as a ranch manager and possible enforcer for a Mexican land baron. By mid-February 1886, Rudabaugh was back in Parral and in rare form.
According to an eyewitness, he ordered a bottle of tequila, elbowed customers from the bar, spat on the floor, cursed out the bartender, shoved a couple of peons against the wall, and bellowed for a poker game. He played for a few minutes, screamed that he had been cheated, stood up, and shot two of the players dead. He walked out of the cantina and drunkenly taunted the residents in the plaza until a local grocer named Jose grabbed a Winchester and put a bullet squarely in Rudabaugh’s chest. Jose then walked over and cut Dave’s head clean off with a bone knife.
The citizens of Parral marched around with Rudabaugh’s head on a pike while his body was dumped in a hole at the edge of town. There are stories that Rudabaugh survived, returned to the United States under an assumed name, and died in Oregon in the late 1920s, but a Tombstone paper published his obituary on March 23, 1886. The death photos have provenance. A nineteen-year-old photographer named Albert W.
Lawn happened to be in Parral when Rudabaugh was killed and snapped four photographs, two of which he printed and sold as postcards. When the governor of Durango learned of this, he demanded the photos and negatives be turned over to him. Lawn kept the two poorer negatives he had not printed, and they would not see the light of day until 1943, when a collector of Western memorabilia obtained them directly from Lawn. One shows a mob carrying Rudabaugh’s head on a pole.
The other is a clear close-up of Dave’s face cradled in the hands of a Mexican federale. The nicknames Arkansas Dave and Dirty Dave have no basis in the historical record. The Dirty Dave label originated from a single newspaper article published in December 1880 that noted Rudabaugh was wearing the same clothes he had worn nine months prior. The Arkansas moniker appears to have been invented by screenwriter John Fusco when he wrote the script for Young Guns 2.
Fusco told a researcher he came across the sobriquet Dirty Dave, which conflicted with a character named Dirty Steve, so he chose a more badass regional name. There are zero known photos of Rudabaugh from his lifetime. The famous images purporting to show him are all unverified. Rudabaugh was simply a mid-level bandit who happened to be in close proximity to more notable characters from the Old West.
He never taught Doc Holliday how to shoot a gun, and there is no evidence Billy the Kid ever feared him. He robbed a few stagecoaches, failed at train robbery, and spent most of his life running. In the end, the only thing that made him unforgettable was the manner of his death, and the head on a pike in a Mexican plaza.