Given to bouts of drunkenness and bad temper, he liked to find an excuse for ‘shooting first’ those who questioned his authority to arrest them.”Īs an illegally deputized gunman, he carried a sawed-off shotgun on horseback, probably a Winchester Model 1897 12-gauge pump action. Martin writes, “Meldrum fashioned a reputation for killing those he was supposed to apprehend when he shot a wanted man in the back of the head. The best account of this conflict is MaryJoy Martin’s “The Corpse on Boomerang Road: Telluride’s War on Labor 1899-1908.” A central figure in the mayhem was Robert “Bob” Meldrum. Telluride’s labor troubles at the turn of the 20th century would become legendary. Sheriff Cal Rutan was also in the pocket of the mine owners, and they gave him a solid gold sheriff’s badge. Mandatory residence in the county was ignored, but then, so were a lot of laws. The mine owners responded by creating the Mine Owners Association to fight the union and to hire “man-killers.” Paid thugs received their monthly wages from the MOA, which then provided these gunmen to the San Miguel County sheriff at no charge. Meldrum drifted down into Telluride in 1903 when the Old West had ended and a new, powerful industrial order was ripping gold and silver ore out of the San Juan Mountains. Meldrum boasted of his friendship with the notorious killer Tom Horn, who was hanged in Wyoming after shooting the son of a homesteader. An artist and saddlemaker, the Pinkerton Detective Agency recommended him because of his quick temper and fast trigger finger. Born in 1866, the same year as Butch, Meldrum straddled the law and may have killed as many as 14 men. What were the real crimes and who were the real criminals in the first decade of the 20th-century West?Ī case in point is the checkered career of Bob Meldrum. Robert Leroy Parker, alias Butch Cassidy, robbed trains with his Wild Bunch, but the railroads themselves robbed small farmers and ranchers by dramatically raising freight rates when it was harvest time and imperative to ship sheep, cattle or wheat. According to one scholar, if Billy the Kid stole a few horses, “the big ranchers had stolen an entire country.” William Bonney, alias Billy the Kid, stole horses but was Irish Catholic, spoke fluent Spanish and was a favorite son of New Mexican Hispanic communities because during the Lincoln County War, he robbed from the cattle barons. Were Billy and Butch really “good” bad men, and if so, what about the “bad” good men who were brutal thugs who hid behind their badges, intimidated, beat and brutalized innocent people and committed crimes under the shadow of the law? One historical theory is that Billy and Butch were “social bandits,” meaning that they stole from the rich and shared with the poor. ![]() ![]() Why is it that we remember and even glorify such Western American outlaws as Billy the Kid and Butch Cassidy when other outlaws are long ago dead, buried and forgotten?
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