Marshal George Flatt: The Cock of the Walk of Caldwell Kansas

 

When first I saw this man’s last name, it tweaked my interest, for I thought we might be related. But not so. My line of Flatts were peaceful farmers from Pennsylvania, his of sterner blood from Virginia by way of an immigrant ancestor from the Orkney Islands, first settled by warlike Picts and Vikings. Sic transit gloria etc. Still, I paid him the tribute of a week’s research. What I found about his brief life (1853-1880), however, makes a flat line with only a few spikes.

He receives a page in Bill O’Neal’s fine 1979 Encyclopedia of Western Gunfighters, but even this accolade hardly stirs the blood. There we learn that his brief notoriety was achieved as “a two-gun lawman” and a drunk, though the last word is my contribution. His memory is preserved by a plaque in the Caldwell City Cemetery in Caldwell County, Kansas. It  memorializes ”Marshal George Flatt” and reads: “Frontier peace officer. He was the first city marshal of Caldwell and was murdered on Main Street by a volley of gun fire from ambush. His murderer was never identified, although his successor as City Marshall was tried and acquitted. He is buried in an unmarked grave next to the grave of his son, Georgie Flatt, who died April 2, 1883. Georgie's grave is marked. Marshal Flatt is memorialized at Panel 61 on the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington, DC. However, his name is misspelled as ‘Flapp.’” Flapp? Sic transit gloria etc.

The biggest flapp in the history of Caldwell came nearly two decades after the murder of Marshall Flatt but it serves here as a measure of the townspeople’s temper. It is associated with Caldwell’s rival town Pond Creek, whose moment of fame came from the little known Enid-Pond Creek Railway War of 1893-1894. In the late 1880s, the Rock Island Railroad built a rail line into Indian Territory, entering near Caldwell, Kansas on the Oklahoma border and following the Chisholm Trail to Texas. The company established railroad stations near the existing stage stations along the trail: Round Pond, built at Pond Stage Stand on Round Pond Creek, and Skeleton Station (later known as Enid Station), located in North Enid, Oklahoma near the Skeleton Ranch headquarters. These would become involved in a controversy between the railroad, the new county seats, and the Department of the Interior. The loyal citizens of both towns began direct actions. Enid passed an ordinance setting a speed limit on trains passing through town to slow the trains but the Rock Island ignored it. Local citizens in both towns began attempting to flag down trains, placed dummies on the tracks, and then left wagons and debris across the rails. With no relief from Washington or the railroads, citizens took further actions. In June 1894, the folks in Pond Creek tore up about a hundred yards of track and wrecked a freight train. No one was killed, but by then residents of both South Enid and Pond Creek were taking potshots at trains passing through. By July they were placing bombs on the tracks, and, in the crowning touch, they sawed partially through a number of supports on the trestle near Enid, wrecking a fourteen-car freight train and its caboose. 

George Flatt died in 1880 long before any of this tempest rocked the small-town teapots, though for all that he didn’t live in quiet times. Caldwell, after all, was on the Chisholm Trail and its many saloons poured the whiskey that fueled the hooliganism too long pent up by the rigors of driving cattle. The story of the Enid-Pond Creek war is a measure of the temper of the townspeople, and these are the people who approved the mayor’s selection of two-gun George as City Marshall in 1879. 

Influenced by my reading of Walter Noble Burns’ The Sage of Billy the Kid (1926) at the tender age of fourteen, I’m always skeptical of western gunmen who wear two guns. It smacks of swagger and pretense. The serious gunmen were satisfied to wear one and use it well. If sometimes they wore a second one, it was only as a backup. Killed at the age of twenty-seven, I suspect George Flatt didn’t live long enough to become serious. At twenty-seven he was still the cock of the walk. 

That announcement of Flatt’s appointment to the office of City Marshall was not the first reference to him in the Caldwell Advance. The first announces that he and a man named William Horseman--soon to be his nemesis--opened an "elegant saloon" near Caldwell's City Hotel called the O.K. Saloon. They were not borrowing glory from the Earp family

since the famous shoot-out in Tombstone didn’t take place until October 1881. That same summer of his wedding, Flatt became Caldwell's first city Marshall, although the next year he was replaced by Horseman and became a “range detective.” That’s what he was when he was killed, in spite of the impression left by the title “Marshall” in the plaque on his grave. It was in this role of cow-cop that he married eighteen-year-old Fanny Lamb and got himself murdered. But before the funeral comes the wedding feast.

George and Fanny’s wedding, by the fulsome newspaper account, was a lollapalooza. It took place “at the residence of H. A. Todd” on Pole Cat Creek and was “quite an enjoyable affair,” the Caldwell Advance alerts its readers, “being attended by a goodly number of the eelite [misspelled to guide pronunciation] of the city. “The bride’s dress was made of fine Empress cloth elegantly trimmed. Among the many presents presented was a nice crystal pitcher by the [groomsman] and bridesmaid.” The latter are named, and then follows a goodly list of other presents and presenters. The goodly items included a cake stand, a fruit dish, a necklace, a clock, a lamp, a set of sauce dishes, a comb and brush, and a cow and calf. In spite of the gifts, the marriage doesn’t seem to have been a happy one. By the time George was City Marshal and thereafter, his drinking kept him out late and he was sleeping in hotel lobbies.

George’s stint as City Marshal was brief, less than a year, and during that time he was involved in two fights and killed one man, possibly two. In the second fight, George was the slain, not the slayer. Ambushed after midnight by an undetermined number of men among whom was at least one with a buckshot-loaded shotgun, George didn’t even have a chance to draw his guns. This seems to me more of a bushwhack than a gunfight, but O’Neal counts it, so I include it in George’s numbers. 

The first fight is recorded with rhetorical length and breathless panache, suggesting that this was the kind of fare that pleased the Advance’s readers:

Late Monday evening our usual quiet little city was thrown into intense excitement by an attack upon our officers of the law by a couple of desperadoes from the Chickasaw Nation, who came into town during the afternoon...and commended spreading themselves over a sufficient quantity of “rot-gut” whiskey to become very troublesome. . . . . they concluded to “take the town,” and began to fire their six-shooters promiscuously on the streets, endangering the lives of our citizens. They finally went back into the Occidental Saloon where they had been, threatening and bragging about the poor victims who had heretofore fallen before the muzzles of their pistols.

Surely the word “heretofore” tells us something important. It seems to mean that the two desperadoes, firing their pistols outside, didn’t shoot anyone. 

About this time Constable W. C. B. Kelly and Deputy Constable John Wilson who had summoned a posse, among whom was the brave and daring George Flatt, to go and suppress them in their lawlessness, came up; Wilson entered the front door and passed to the back part of the room near the middle door. Flatt followed stopping at the bar, in front of the room where the men were standing.

Here’s the stuff reputations are built on: adjectives like “brave and daring.” What Flatt had ever done to deserve these words remains a mystery to me, though I have read every article in the Advance that talks about him. It may have been a phosphorescence of his two-gun swagger and his drinking. Yet, it’s a good performance, as we shall see.

They dropped on the object of Wilson and Flatt, and docking their pistols, which was distinctly heard by the officers and holding them down by their sides at the same time making for the door, but Flatt seeing their object was to get between him and the door backed out right in front of them. On reaching the door they both leveled their six-shooters on him demanding his arms; Flatt replied: “I’ll die first;” and at that instant one of the fellows fired; the ball passing close by Flatt’s head and grazed the temple of W. H. Kiser, who stood a little in the rear. Flatt then drew both of his pistols which he had kept concealed behind him, and fired with the one in his right hand at the man who had got farthest out the door, the ball taking effect on the right hand, taking off the end of the fore-finger, and also the trigger the finger was on and penetrating the body in the upper part of the right breast ranging downward passing through both lungs and coming out a little below the left shoulder blade, which caused him to drop heavily to the sidewalk and rolling off in the street died almost instantly. 

The prose here also does some rolling off. I tried to clarify the matter with a period, but gave up the job as being past the power of periods to cure, leaving the run-on style in all of its breathlessness. 

The man who stood in the door and shot first, received a ball in the right side, which passed straight through his body, from the pistol held in Flatt’s left hand; the ma returned the fire at Flatt, and then turned and fired at Wilson, who was closing in the rear, the ball glazed Wilson’s Wrist, making a slight flesh wound, Wilson returned the fire so rapidly that the man failed to get his work in, although he is said to have been an expert with a six-shooter. Wilson’s first shot took effect in the right hand of the fellow, and the second in the abdomen just below the short ribs, from which he fell, shooting Wilson in the thigh as he went down. 

Another panting passage, but a charitable reading suggests the style may be an objective correlative of the writer’s sense that everything happened in an instant, albeit a prolonged instant. A period, grammatically, is a full stop, and in the rolling thunder of the Occidental Bar there were no stops. 

I was a sockdolager  of a gunfight, but calm returns with the entrance of Coroner Thomas.

After the excitement subsided somewhat, Esq. Thomas acting as coroner summed a jury of six men and held an inquest over the dead bodies of the two men….The jury, after a partial examination adjourned until nine o’clock the next day, at which time a number of witnesses were examined. The jury returned the following verdict: “That said men came to their death by pistol shots fired from the hands of the officers of the law and their deputies, while in the act of performing their duties. Their bodies were properly interred.”

Order prevailed, but I’m bothered by the last sentence. I have no reason to doubt its truth, but I can’t help noticing that though the names of the two cowboys are given neither of them has a memorial in the Caldwell City Cemetery. Sic transit the glory of town takers, and right now (January 2020) I’m in no mood to make memorials for a pair of hooligans. I’ve had enough hooliganism in our nation’s capitol. 

Though as I write it has yet to happen in Washington D.C., there was a “smooth transition” in the office of City Marshal some time in 1880, as George Flatt was replaced by his business partner William Horseman. I have found nothing about that appointment in the Caldwell newspaper and consequently have nothing to say, but knowing Flatt it must have rankled him to lose his position. There seems to have been bad blood between the two men, and Horseman (along with Frank Hunt, another business partner and something of a gunman himself) was indicted for the killing of Flatt. Though when tried Horseman was found not-guilty, the Advance notes in a couple of articles that he continued to be widely suspected. Of course he would be, since it was he who benefitted most by Flatt’s death, for the office of City Marshal paid well and included various plummy fees. Flatt was now a “range detective,” that is to say a cow-cop, a position of little glory and less income. The best known range detective was Tom Horn (1860-1903) in the Johnson County Wars, but Horn was a large figure of serious abilities and his story has little relevance here.

Which brings us to the last gunfight, in which George was not the slayer but the slain. George was drinking again that night, and it was about one o’clock in the morning and late in the month of June 1880 as he and a few companions were on their way to eat some breakfast. The Advance opines that “the citizens of Caldwell began to flatter themselves with the idea that the day of the shotgun and the revolver had forever departed from its limits [perhaps in part because Flatt was no longer the city marshal], but this notion was suddenly and forcibly dispelled.”

The saloons were all closed and the quiet of the night was unbroken, when all of a sudden there rang out upon the air the reports of several firearms fired in quick succession. The people rushed out of their houses towards the place from which the shooting seemed to come,  and found George W. Flatt weltering in his blood. The police force was immediately upon the ground and shortly after Justice Kelly and Dr. Noble arrived upon the scene. Upon the examination of the body by Dr. Noble, it was found that life was entirely extinguished.

“The fatal shot had been the first one, which entered the base of the skull.” Flatt had other wounds but the first was enough. He was not just dead, but like the famous dog Rover, when he was dead he was dead all over. 

The coroner’s report and the recorded testimony ran to two full columns of news-print, with which I forebear to fatigue the reader, but one bit of testimony stands out. H. A. Ross, the jeweler, testified that he saw Flatt coming down the street shortly before the bushwhacking and heard him say to a companion that “he was the cock of the walk of Caldwell.” With his two-gun swagger, well he might think so. The presence of Mike Meagher should also be noted, both in the group of people gathered after the shooting and in the list of initial suspects. Meagher, himself no slouch as a gunman, would become Mayor after Flatt’s death, but another shooting would erase him from the scene before he had time to brag about it.

A different aspect of the murder emerges in the Advance’s rival newspaper, The Caldwell Commercial. Their different points of view concerning Flatt’s murder are readily apparent. The Advance is happy to be rid of the cocky Flatt, while the Commercial suspects a conspiracy: 

The murder was committed upon the sidewalk in the most public part of the town, and though two policemen were but a short distance from the scene of the murder when the shots, five in number, were fired, no clue to the murderer or murderers was obtained. Last summer, while Flatt held the office of city marshal, he killed two men in trying to make the arrest of some cowboys from Texas, and it is said the friends of the cowboys had sworn to have his life. Flatt had been drinking during the evening, and was unusually noisy. He had his revolvers out a number of times and threatened the officers and everyone else. He was a man that was very much feared, for it was well understood that he would shoot upon very small provocation.

This is tantalizing but incomplete. The good citizens of Caldwell were content to try the prime suspect and release him, and that ended the matter. One other detail emerges in the Commercial article, however. It credits Flatt with the killing both of the cowboys in the earlier related fight. True or false, if Flatt believed it, it would have contributed to his high opinion of himself. A moment of drunken pride before which, in a moment of poetic justice, the crash of the ambush brings about his fall. 

George Flatt missed his surest road to glory--glory, which is the shining form of common remembrance. He had a son, it’s true, but little Georgie was his only child and died at the age of three (by which time his mother Fannie had married a man named Muntzing, as seen below). George had no descendants, and thus no one to remember him and over time, by the sure action of nostalgia, to magnify his memory. He is in fact lucky to have little Georgie’s tombstone next to his own burial spot to mark the place. His claims to glory remain but three. He has his plaque, pictured above, and another in Washington D.C. with his surname misspelled,  and he has his column of print in the Encyclopedia of Western Gunfighters, itemizing the one big fight that made him, however briefly, the cock of the walk of Caldwell.

[Note: I’m publishing this essay in an unfinished state. Only late in the writing did I see the importance of the Wellington newspapers as an alternative source of information. I need time to study their alternative viewpoint and to research the political history of the county. So the present essay should be considered Work in Progress.]

[Note: I regret that only found this book after completing my essay: Miller, Nyle H., and Joseph W. Snell. Great Gunfighters of the Kansas Cowtowns, 1867-1886. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963.  It's a work of impressive scholarship, no surprise when we learn it first appeared in issues of the Kansas State Historical Quarterly. Scholars will appreciate it, though the general reader may have trouble with the long transcriptions of newspaper articles.]