Okay, last time, I had us in the town of Ozona, Texas, which was named after ozone. No. Really. Would I lie to you? Okay. Don’t answer that.
But I also said Ozona had a connection to Judge Roy Bean, one of the most colorful figures in the history of Texas and of cowboys, which is saying something, because Texas has several things in plenty...but the three items at the top of the list are, surely, oil, cattle, and colorful eccentrics.
How to describe Judge Roy Bean (1825 – 1903)? Honestly, I’m not sure I can. Maybe I should just send you to his Wikipedia entry.(1). Or tell you to do a search on the Web. But...at the very least...let me try to provide you with a tiny bit of background. But, a word of warning, historians of the west have to rely on the reports of Bean and his friends and his enemies. And, well, bluntly, those folks sometimes had a fairly casual relationship with the concept of Truth. They were also fond of a good story, real or imagined. So, take what follows with a grain of salt. We’ll probably never know for certain...(2)
Anyway, Bean was born in Kentucky into a large family which knew great poverty. At sixteen, he left home for New Orleans in search of employment. He soon got into trouble with someone there (it isn’t clear exactly who), and then headed out to join an older brother in San Antonio, Texas. This would become a pattern of his early life. He’d work for a while in one area, sometimes one side of the law, sometimes on the other, get into a scape of some sort, and then he’d flee...frequently to join another brother someplace else.
About the photos: First, Judge Roy Bean. This photograph is from Wikipedia and is believed to be in the public domain. You may see it here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Phantly_Roy_Bean,_Jr._.jpg
Second, the Judge in his court. This image is from the Library of Congress and, as before, is believed to be in the public domain. The citation for the picture is: Historic American Buildings Survey, Creator. Judge Roy Bean Saloon & Justice Court, Langtry, Val Verde County, TX. Documentation Compiled After. Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/tx0268/>.
Third, and nothing to do with the story, but I just like the shot, here’s Martha and me in front of the El Pinto restaurant in New Mexico. This was from our trip to Albuquerque in 2024.
So it was that he bounced across the American West and parts of Northern Mexico, usually just one step ahead of an outraged sheriff. Or a mob. In Chihuahua, Mexico, where he and a brother were running a trading post, he supposedly shot and killed a local gunman...probably in self-defense. Then he was off to San Diego, California, there to join another brother, Joshua, later the first mayor of San Diego, where Roy was...reportedly, or so we’re told...a great favorite of the ladies. Supposedly...supposedly...they thought he was a dashing young lad.
Then, he got into a duel ... over a woman, supposedly...and, though neither Roy nor the other man were killed, he was arrested for attempted murder. Wikipedia informs us (somewhat gleefully) that while he was in jail, he “received many gifts of flowers, food, wine and cigars from women in San Diego.” He escaped, possibly with the assistance of one of those “women in San Diego,” who supposedly provided him with tools hidden inside a tamale. Not quite a file baked in a cake, but pretty close.
From there, he went to San Gabriel, California, where he worked in a saloon owned by ...you guessed it...one of his brothers. But then this brother got murdered (details are sketchy), and Roy set up as the sole proprietor. He was then courting a local woman, but she was kidnapped and forced to marry an officer in the Mexican army (or so it is said). Roy challenged the officer to a duel. The officer ended up dead. The officer’s friends then caught and hanged Roy from a tree. But, or so we’re told, the woman who’d been kidnapped dashed out of hiding and managed to cut him down before he died. Supposedly.
Anyway, Roy then fled to join his brother Sam who was living in New Mexico and running a store and saloon near what is now Silver City. He might have stayed there for life but then along came the Civil War and the next thing you know, Roy is making serious money transporting cotton from San Antonio to the Mexican city of Matamoros where it was picked up by British ships and taken to the Mills (Satanic and otherwise) of Manchester.
Then the war ended and he pursued a variety of other business enterprises in San Antonio, including stealing his neighbors’ trees and selling them for firewood, running a dairy (he watered the milk), and rustling cattle. Somewhere along the way, he also got married, and it doesn’t seem to have been a match made in heaven. Wikipedia describes the relationship as “tumultuous.” I might prefer the term abusive. I can only hope that the lady gave as good as she got.
Skipping over several events in his life (many of them shady), Roy then headed off toward the Pecos River. The railroads were coming through the area, and they had employed large numbers of men to work on the tracks. Those men were bored and thirsty. And, for a saloon operator like Roy, that meant money to be made. Soon, he was selling whiskey (and God alone knows what else) in a tent city called Vinegaroon. Later, he moved to more permanent quarters in the town of Langtry, which was right on the Mexican border.(3)
Then, somewhere along the line, the Texas authorities decided they needed to enforce a bit of law and order in the area. Somehow, they stumbled on Roy Bean. And, in one of those amazing twists of fate that you could never put in fiction because nobody would believe it...Roy, who had been a criminal or semi-criminal for pretty much his whole adult life...was named Justice Of The Peace.
And thus “Law West of the Pecos” was born.
Stay tuned. There’s lots more to come. And it is just as unbelievable. Until next time...
Footnotes:
1. I’m using several sources for the life of Judge Bean. These include, but are not limited to:
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Bean
“The Planting of Judge Roy Bean How the “Law West of the Pecos” got his start,” by Mark Boardman, May 3, 2017, True West, https://web.archive.org/web/20180118123917/https://truewestmagazine.com/planting-judge-roy-bean/
“Law West of the Pecos,” Texas Time Travel, Texas Historical Commission, https://texastimetravel.com/directory/judge-roy-bean-visitor-center/
“140 Years Ago, Judge Roy Bean Became the ‘Law West of the Pecos,’ The infamous justice of the peace whose courthouse was a saloon left a legacy that still attracts visitors,” by Gene Fowler, Texas Highways, August 2, 2022, https://texashighways.com/travel-news/140-years-ago-judge-roy-bean-became-the-law-west-of-the-pecos/
2. There are a lot of reasons we should be very careful with the stories of Roy Bean’s life, just as we need to a bit skeptical of the stories of all the great Western heroes and badmen. Chief among these is that at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, all the major newspapers were titillating their readers with thrilling tales of life in the Wild West. There was a ready market for “real” stories of shoot-outs and heroic cowboys on the lonesome prairies. So, reporters fanned out across the West, collecting such tales from informants all too eager to provide them.
Thus it was, for example, that Bat Masterson gained the reputation as a steely-eyed sheriff who blasted down bad-guys from one end of the West to the other -- when, in point, he may have never killed anyone at all. And it says much about him that he eventually ended up in New York as a sports writer for the New York Morning Telegraph, where he also met Damon Runyon and became the model for Runyon’s romantic character, the good-hearted gambler Sky Masterson.
3. Langtry, Texas has its own Wikipedia page here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langtry,_Texas
A few notes about the town. First, it is 109 miles from Ozona, which means that the Roy Bean connection with Ozona seems a little thin. But, more about that later. Second, it was named after George Langtry, who was a foreman for the railroad in the area--not, as myth would have it, after Lillie Langtry, who was Roy Bean’s most serious crush. Third, it still exists, but as of 2016, it had a population of 12.
Copyright©2024 Michael Jay Tucker
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