Mike Meagher: The Good Lawman

Michael Meagher was an Irishman--himself, his parents, his siblings, all born in County Cavan in Ulster, drumlin country dotted with lakes and hills. How they got to North America, the record saith not. The U.S. census first locates the family in Utica Illinois in 1860, listing Mike’s parents (Timothy and Ellen Meagher) and two brothers but not Mike, who would have been seventeen. In 1873 Timothy and his son John proved a homestead together in Wichita Township, Sedgwick County. Given an average of seven years to prove up, they were probably there by 1866. The 1870 census lists the father Timothy as “infirm” so his two sons probably farmed the 320 acres between them. Even so, it would have been no great harvest. They were west of the 98th meridian with annual rainfall less than twenty inches per year. Homesteaders with 160 acres regularly went bust. “In God we trusted / In Kansas we busted” was the refrain. West of the 98th meridian was not farm country by traditional agricultural standards. As the case would prove, it was cattle country.

Out on the flat and treeless great plains, the drumlin-country Meaghers must have thought they’d arrived at the far side of the moon. It was indeed the far side of lawlessness, and by 1871 both Mike and John were lawmen in Wichita, and there they proved to have one great talent in common, the ability to enforce the law and keep public order, even in a cowtown as wild and gone-to-hell as Wichita, historically the second of the important cowtowns of Kansas, close on the hooves of Abilene. Both born about 1843, John made wise career moves and lived more than eighty years. Mike did alright until he chose to practice outlaw-busting in in the boom town of Caldwell, where he lasted about one year before in 1881 the hoot-owls and hooligans gunned him down.

It is a mild surprise to note that Mike Meagher rates an entry in O’Neal’s Encyclopedia of Western Gunfighters (1979), for if there’s one thing Meagher clearly was not it was a gunfighter. He didn’t kill anyone, except in one clear case of self-defense. His career bares comparison with the early, pre-Tombstone career of Wyatt Earp or that of Bill Tilghman. Earp comes more readily to mind since the two men worked together in Wichita between 1871 and 1875. They shared an important trait: they were tough but not deadly. A book-length study of Earp accurately describes lawman work in Wichita:

Earp understood his duty as a lawman was to prevent trouble, not ignite it. Law enforcement meant keeping the peace more than solving crimes or hunting down wrongdoers, because the cowtowns were not so much centers of criminality as they were wild areas subject to the instant outbreak of disorder. The police  had to keep the drovers and townsmen from killing each other at night so they could do business the  next day. the Wichita police would not tolerate man killers on the force.

Merchants wanted trade, and dead cowboys were bad for business. The intolerance for killers is an important point, for it distinguishes Wichita from a cowtown like Caldwell, which hired gunslingers for City Marshals, none of whom lasted a year before being killed. Earp and Meagher’s duties included many that a gunslinger wouldn’t have stooped to. They might have to inspect chimneys, sweep the sidewalks, or drag off dead animals. Officers had to control packs of wild dogs that infested the area, and they were charged with replacing broken planks in the sidewalks (Tefertiller 14). Not at all the kind of work we could imagine “cock of the walk” Marshal George Flatt doing in Caldwell (died, aged 27), but Earp could tolerate it (died aged 80), and so could Meagher, who lived to be 38 before a drunk cowboy picked up a Winchester rifle, and changed the rules of the gunfight game. 

One disagreement is known between Meagher and Earp in the Wichita period. It was not personal but merely political, but because online references to it are always garbled, it is worth taking a moment to set the record straight. First of all, it needs to be kept in mind that Meagher was five years older than Earp, and had been a lawman in Wichita about four years before Earp was appointed in 1875. Meagher had seniority (Tefertiller 13-15).

Meagher had been appointed to the office of City Marshal in 1871 and served until April of 1874, when a new city council decided to replace him with Bill Smith, whose detective work in solving a murder case had drawn much local praise. Meagher served as a deputy U.S. marshal a year before returning to Wichita in 1875 to run for his old job, which he won easily drawing 340 votes to Smith’s 65. In the same election the next year, Earp may have taken too active an interest. Smith charged that if Meagher was reelected he would place Earp’s brothers on the police force. When Earp then attacked Smith with his fists, Meagher fired him for disturbing the peace. Earp received a serious $30 fine--about two weeks’ wages. 1876 was also the year that saw a decline in the cattle trade in Wichita, as the railroads moved west and farmers started busting sod in the cattle ranges of Sedgwick County. Earp moved west to Dodge and his famous further adventures, while Meagher stayed around Wichita keeping the peace.

Initially the office of Marshal was appointive, and after a new mayor was elected in May of 1874, a story in the Wichita paper reported Meagher considering retirement to private life to perhaps “become a granger and with the granger stand.” That is, he’d lost his appointment. If he did go back to farming, it didn’t last very long, and instead of following a mule’s ass down a furrow, he was doing miscellaneous law enforcement. Evidently the law changed sometime before May of 1876 when Meagher announced he was running for City Marshal. 

It was as City Marshal, then, that he had his fight to the death with Sylvester Powell in January 1877. It started out as much ado about nothing. Someone threw a snowball at Powell while he was riding down Main street, knocking his hat off. He supposed it was a man named Dennison, who at that time was standing in a wagon in front of Mr. Robert’s store auctioneering it off. Powell jumped off his horse, picked up the neck yoke of the wagon and hurled it at Dennison, striking him on the right forearm and fracturing it.” Dennison filed a complaint, and a warrant was issued and handed to Meagher. Powell was arrested and taken before the police judge, who fined him $23. Having no money Powell was sent to jail, but the agent of the Kansas Stage Company he worked for went his bail and that evening he was released. He immediately went looking for Meagher, found him in the saloon, pulled his pistol and shot at him. The officer jumped for Powell, trying to wrest the pistol away, during the course of which struggle Powell managed to get off two more shots. Powell then jerked away and ran. Passing down the alley, the marshal fired at him and he returned the fire. Meagher then ran around the corner, saw Powell approaching with his right hand in his pocket, and supposing he meant to fire again, Meagher shot him, the bullet going through Powell’s heart. As he fell he exclaimed, ”My God, what have I done.” 

The above account is abridged from the Wichita Beacon for 3 January 1877. O’Neal, oddly for an encyclopedia writer, gives a more colorful account. First he changes the scene of the encounter from the saloon to an outdoor toilet about 9:00 p.m. 

In the moonlight Powell crept up to the little building and suddenly opened fire. One slug whipped through Meagher’s coat, and a second bullet bit into his lower leg.

Without hesitation the startled marshal sprang at Powell and grappled with the assassin. Another slug grazed Meagher’s hand, and Powell broke away and fled down an alley. Powell fired a fourth shot as he ran, and Meagher at last pulled his gun and squeezed off a round in return. The marshal then limped to the street and soon spied Powell sanding in front of Charles Hill’s Drug Store. Meagher deliberately took aim and fired a bullet straight into Powell’s heart.

Powell is dead when he hits the ground and doesn’t invoke the name of God.

Powell’s chief failing seems to have been a hot temper that he could not control. Breaking a man’s arm for a snowball that he didn’t even throw is already excessive. And, if we accept O’Neal’s account, sneaking up on a fellow in the outhouse seems like cowardice. The point of the episode for Meagher, however, is that Powell is the only man he is known to have killed in over ten years as a lawman. 

The next gunfight in which Meagher is involved was in Caldwell in December of 1881 and it will be his last. It was a common place encounter between the law and a group of five drunken cowboys, an arena in which Meagher had plenty of experience. He had always succeeded in quelling the gunplay with a judicious use of gentle firmness and eloquence. I add “eloquence” here remembering that Meaghan was Irish. He would have spoken English with an Irish lilt, creating a music that, it would seem at least, had power to calm the savage breast. For a moment, at any rate, until the men had time to figure out what he was saying, by which time their pistols would already be pointing at the floor. The music failed him however in Caldwell, a rough unmusical town that had produced nine dead marshals in ten years. 

The trouble started with a hooligan named Jim Talbot (sometimes spelled with a double t at the end), though it would turn out that Talbot may not have been his true name. The details of the fight are too many to enumerate and Talbot’s companions too numerous to name. Suffice it to say it began one evening with harsh words between a drunken Talbot and Meagher, then it continued the next afternoon with Talbot swearing to kill Meagher and the sheriff John Wilson. The two lawmen confronted Talbot and his friends and tried to disarm them, In the course of the ensuing turmoil Talbot, who lived in town, went home and got his Winchester, sealing Meagher’s fate from a distance far enough to make the latter’s pistol futile.  

The man who pulled the rifle trigger would prove much harder to kill--indeed, to catch. The man was known to be called Jim Talbott, but the name it would turn out was an alias and Talbott disappeared. Meagher’s mother, his sister Mary, and her husband Capt J. M. Steele came to Caldwell and took the body back to Wichita. That all three of them came was a show of family solidarity, and if Meagher’s funeral was as splendid as his encomium, it was fine indeed. Appearing in The Wichita Eagle, it ends this way:  “Kind of heart, gentle as a child, generous and open in all things, always helpful and never overbearing, his life was a heroic ideal.” In avoiding the usual cliches about a dead lawman’s life, the writer of this obituary makes us believe his words.  

Meanwhile back in Caldwell, rewards for the killer had been quickly posted, even one by the governor himself offering $500 for Talbot and $300 each for his four accomplices. That’s a total of $1700, a lot of money for 1881, but Talbot had disappeared. 

Or had he? It would depend on which of the county’s three newspapers you were reading. In blaming the journalists I’m on uncertain ground, for it’s quite possible that Newspapers.com is missing certain issues of the papers. Still there are plenty there, enough to make it certain that none of them had ever heard of fact checking. Nor was there any mutual consultation among the editors. Instead, there seems to have been a competition among them to see which could produce the most sensational account. 

I haven’t found any article stating the fact of Talbot’s capture, but two assume it has happened and one, chronologically the first, offers a new explanation of Talbot’s identity and his motive. It came one week after the killing, on  22 December 1881. The Sumner County Press (published in Wellington, the county seat) states: "Talbott, whose real name is Sherman, is a native of Buchanan county, Missouri, and a cowardly desperado by instinct. It seems that he is a cousin to one Powell, whom Mike Meagher killed in 1876, while marshal of Wichita.”  Readers can only scratch their heads at this, since there is no followup or any interrogation of the source. The Powell link would seem to be pure rumor.

Six months later, in June of 1882, the same Sumner County Press reports that Talbot is on trial in Wellington for murder. The article is called “Of Good Family,” and it gives his name as Jim Talbott Sherman, and declares that he is a cousin of General William Tecumseh Sherman. In Georgia or South Carolina, the general was considered a barbarian, a heavy-weight hooligan who ordered the burning and pillaging of entire cities, but his name was still honored among the Republicans of Kansas. We are told that Talbot was reared in DeKalb (not Buchanan) County Missouri, where his father, a Union supporter, was killed in 1861, when Talbot was ten years old. The boy was reared by other relatives and thus changed his name. We are supposed to believe these assertions because they come from the personal knowledge of the “Hon. W. J. Lingenfelter.” To learn that Talbot is on trial is promising, but still the reader wonders how and when he was captured. And we would certainly like to have a followup that tells what the jury decided. 

Perhaps a legal flaw was found in the trial proceedings--if the trial ever took place--and Talbot was released. If so, he headed for the far west, where two years later (September 1894) the Sumner County Press reported that he was about to be tried for murder in California, but the west coast authorities wanted to have him extradited to Kansas, where they believed the charges against him were more likely to lead to conviction. I found no followup to this article either. By this time three years have passed, and the furor over Meagher’s murder is fading from memory.

So wagged the world of journalism on that fierce and lawless frontier. Meanwhile, the cemeteries were crowded with the graves of those who had paid the fiddler and gone into the great dark with their boots on.

[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.]