The barkeep’s glass still stood on the counter when the air tore apart with gunfire. Four men lay dead or dying in the dusty street outside the Keating saloon, and it had taken less than five seconds. At the center of it stood a tall man in a frock coat, a smoking revolver in each hand, his face calm beneath a well-kept mustache. Dallas Stoudenmire, the newly sworn marshal of El Paso, had just entered the legend of the American West—though the trouble that made him a hero would, in the end, be the very trouble that killed him.
Stoudenmire was born on December 11, 1845, in Aberfoil, Alabama, the son of Louis and Elizabeth Stoudenmire and one of nine children. In 1862, still in his teens, he enlisted in the Confederate army and served in the 45th Alabama Infantry. He was wounded several times and carried two bullets in his body for the rest of his life. After the war, around 1867, he drifted to Columbus, Texas, where he was said to have killed several men in disputes.
He was a dangerous man, but those who knew him described a curious contradiction: at six feet four inches, with a handsome face and a taste for well-tailored clothing, he was unfailingly polite to ladies, who found him charming. When sober, he could be courteous to a fault. When drinking, he was quick-tempered and volatile, and he drank often. He spent his working years in a string of trades—sheep herder, carpenter, wheelwright, merchant—but his true skill lay in marksmanship.
He trained until he was equally deadly with either hand and always carried two revolvers. In time he joined the Texas Rangers, and in 1874 he served as a second sergeant in Company D under Captain Waller. He lived for a stretch in the Texas Panhandle, spent time in Mexico during the years of Maximilian, and briefly held the post of marshal in Socorro, New Mexico. It was there that his brother-in-law, Stanley “Doc” Cummings, persuaded him to come to El Paso and take the marshal’s job.
El Paso in 1881 was one of the roughest towns in the West. Violence was a daily occurrence, and the city council was desperate. In the eight months before Stoudenmire’s arrival, the town had gone through six marshals. When Stoudenmire rode in in early April 1881, he was hired almost immediately, taking office on April 11.
His first duty was to collect the keys to the city jail from a deputy marshal who was, in effect, the town drunk. The deputy, Bill Johnson, mumbled that he would go home and figure out which keys were the right ones. Stoudenmire had no patience for it. He demanded the keys on the spot.
When Johnson continued to stall, Stoudenmire flipped the man bodily upside down, took the keys, and threw him to the ground. He had been on the job only hours, and he had already made an enemy. Three days later, on April 14, 1881, Stoudenmire found himself at the center of one of the most famous gunfights in Texas. A constable named Kremko was drinking in the Keating saloon, one of the worst dives in El Paso, when he got into an argument with the town’s former marshal, George Campbell.
Campbell’s friend John Hale was also in the saloon. Hale was drunk and unarmed, but when the argument escalated, he snatched one of Campbell’s revolvers and shouted, “George, I’ll protect you. ” He shot Kremko, who fell wounded at the saloon’s door. Realizing what he had done, Hale bolted behind a pillar just as Marshal Stoudenmire appeared on the street, revolvers drawn.
Stoudenmire fired once, but the bullet went wide and struck an innocent Mexican bystander. Hale peered around the pillar, and Stoudenmire fired again. The bullet hit Hale between the eyes and killed him instantly. Campbell, seeing his friend fall, came out of the saloon waving his pistol and shouting, “Gentlemen, this is not my fight.
” Kremko, bleeding on the floor, disagreed, and fired a shot that hit Campbell in the wrist and a toe. Stoudenmire turned and fired at Campbell as well, putting three bullets into his stomach. As Campbell collapsed into the dusty street, he cried out, “You rascal, you have killed me. ”
When the smoke cleared, George Campbell and Constable Kremko were both dead.
Four men had fallen in under five seconds in a gunfight that looked, to later observers, almost like a farce. Newspapers as far away as San Francisco and New York carried the story, and Stoudenmire became a legend overnight. The violence did not stop. Three days later, on April 17, the wealthy Manning brothers—friends of both Hale and Campbell—persuaded Bill Johnson, still smarting from the humiliation of being flipped upside down and robbed of his jail keys, to assassinate Stoudenmire.
Johnson needed little convincing. He took a rifle and hid behind a large adobe pillar, waiting. Soon he heard Stoudenmire’s voice, along with that of his brother-in-law, Doc Cummings. As Johnson raised his rifle to aim, the drunken fool instead slipped and fell, accidentally firing two harmless shots into the air.
Stoudenmire wasted no time. He fired several rounds toward the pillar and left Johnson dead in the dusty street. This only deepened the Manning brothers’ hatred, and they began to plot revenge. But for now, Stoudenmire continued his campaign against the lawless town.
Between the Johnson shooting in April and February of the following year, he killed six more men in gunfights during arrests. As his legend grew, the rate of violent crime in El Paso began to fall. The town was, at last, being tamed. In February 1882, Stoudenmire returned briefly to Columbus, Texas, to marry Isabella Sherrington.
While he was away, on February 14, James Manning killed his brother-in-law and close friend, Stanley “Doc” Cummings. Manning and Cummings were arguing in the Coliseum, a saloon owned by Manning himself. The argument spiraled until gun smoke filled the room. When it cleared, Cummings had staggered out the door of the saloon and fallen dead in the street.
Manning was arrested, but at trial the verdict came back self-defense. The jury was packed with local men, many of them friends of the Mannings. Stoudenmire was furious. The one man who could always calm him down was Doc Cummings, and Cummings was now dead.
Stoudenmire began drinking heavily and confronting anyone he felt was responsible for Manning’s acquittal. Things became so bad that many people avoided coming into town or visiting saloons altogether, for fear of running into him. Though he had proven effective as a lawman, his behavior was alienating the local population. He was also an outsider, in a town where the Manning family had many friends.
The city officials tried to control Stoudenmire’s drinking by passing a law making it illegal for law enforcement officers to drink in public, with a fine for those caught. The flaw in the plan was that Stoudenmire was the one who collected the fines. The law was a failure, and Stoudenmire kept drinking. His behavior grew more confrontational and strange.
He was known to use the bell of St. Clement’s Church as a target for target practice during his patrols through the streets. He was suspected of spending unauthorized funds, and he continually quarreled with city officials. His list of enemies grew, and one of them was George Washington Carrico, editor of the El Paso Times, who claimed that the town’s crime rate varied in inverse proportion to the marshal’s sobriety.
By May 27, 1882, the city had finally had enough. The council announced that they would dismiss the marshal. But when Stoudenmire, drunk, confronted them and challenged them to take either his gun or his job, they backed down. Two days later, sober, Stoudenmire resigned on his own.
He took over running the Globe, a restaurant that had belonged to his murdered brother-in-law Doc Cummings. In July, he also accepted a commission as a deputy U. S. marshal.
But neither role stopped him from settling disputes with his guns, and his feud with the Manning family continued. The bad blood ran so deep that residents convinced Stoudenmire and the Mannings to sign a peace treaty, which was published in the El Paso Herald. Even so, whenever Stoudenmire drank, the threats resumed. On September 18, 1882, Stoudenmire met the Manning brothers—Duke, Frank, and Jim—again in one of the Manning saloons to sign yet another peace treaty.
Almost immediately, Duke and Dallas began arguing over the first peace treaty. Before anyone could react, both men had drawn their pistols. Duke fired first, shattering Stoudenmire’s left arm and forcing him to drop his weapon. A second bullet hit the pocket of Stoudenmire’s shirt, which was stuffed with papers; the slug did not pierce his skin, but the impact knocked him backward through the saloon doors and into the street.
Stoudenmire, who had trained himself to shoot equally well with both hands, drew his other pistol and fired at Duke as he came out the door, hitting him in the arm. Jim Manning then followed and fired two shots. One went wide. The other struck Stoudenmire behind the left ear and killed him instantly.
Even though the former marshal was dead, Duke Manning, still enraged, continued to beat the body with his own pistol. James and Duke Manning were arrested, but they were acquitted after the incident was ruled self-defense. Stoudenmire’s funeral was held at Masonic Lodge No. 130 in El Paso, and his wife had his body shipped to Columbus, Texas, for burial.
He was laid to rest in Elton Cemetery. The Manning family continued to live in El Paso, and soon the killing of Dallas Stoudenmire was forgotten entirely. In the arc of his life, Stoudenmire had taken part in more gunfights than most of his better-known contemporaries—Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Elfego Baca, Luke Short, Doc Holliday, and John Selman among them.
He was credited with taming one of the most violent towns of the Old West, a lawman who brought order to El Paso with two revolvers and an unshakeable nerve, until the very violence he commanded caught up with him in a dusty street outside a saloon.
