Deadliest Gunfight in American History. One Man Against Fourteen.

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Jonathan R. Davis was a gold rush prospector. On 19 December 1854, he single-handedly killed eleven armed outlaws at Rocky Canyon near Sacramento, California using two Colt revolvers and a Bowie knife. This episode is possibly the single deadliest small arms engagement in American history where one man went up against multiple foes

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Jonathan Davis was born on August 5, 1816, to a prosperous family in Monticello, South Carolina.  He was an educated man, having studied at the University of South Carolina. In December 1846, he enlisted in the Palmetto Regiment of Volunteers for service in the Mexican War. He was soon promoted to second lieutenant.  He served with great distinction and fought in many battles; he was wounded in action at Churubusco.  He was known as an expert pistol shot, and according to a friend he was "second to none in the state as a fencer." He was an honorary captain, but was called Captain Davis.

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On December 19, 1854, Captain Davis and two fellow prospectors were walking down a miner's trail in Rocky Canyon in El Dorado County, on the North Fork of the American River.  His two companions were armed with pistols; Captain Davis carried two Colt revolvers and a large Bowie knife.

A band of robbers was lying in wait in the canyon brush near the trail.  Among the bandits were two Americans, one Frenchman, two Britons, five Australians and four Mexicans. Fourteen in all.  The band had robbed and murdered six Chinese two days before, and had robbed and killed four Americans the previous day.  Two of the gang had been wounded in these encounters.

As Captain Davis and his companions walked past the place of ambush, the bandit gang charged out of the brush, shooting their pistols.  James McDonald, one of Captain Davis' two companions died instantly, without time to draw his revolver or react in any way.  The other, Dr. Sparks, managed to get his six-shooter out and fire twice at the highwaymen before he dropped, badly wounded.

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Captain Davis later described himself as being "in a fever of excitement at the time." He stood his ground and, like Wyatt Earp, kept his nerve.  His aim was deadly accurate. One after another he shot down his assailants. The outlaw bullets tore at Davis's clothing but caused only two slight flesh wounds. Within moments seven of the bandits were dead or dying on the ground, and Davis's pistols were empty.  At the very least seven of his twelve bullets found their target (or seven of ten if he kept one chamber empty).

Four of the remaining robbers, three armed with Bowie knives and one with a short sword, now closed in on the Captain to finish him off.  With his Bowie knife Captain Davis warded off the thrusts from the two most aggressive bandits.  He stabbed one of them to death; the other he disarmed by knocking the knife from his grasp and slicing off his nose and a finger of his right hand.

The two last attackers were the men who had been wounded in the previous raids. Despite their weakened condition, they foolishly approached Davis with drawn knives. As the captain explained later, he did not know that they were wounded: "Two of the four that made the charge upon me were unable to fight on account of their old wounds. They came up with the rest, making warlike demonstrations by raising their knives in a striking posture, and I acted accordingly. I noticed that they handled them with very bad grace, but attributed it altogether to fright or natural awkwardness."  He killed them both.

Seven of the robbers were dead, three desperately wounded, and the eleventh, the now noseless bandit, did not appear to be fatally injured. The final three remaining outlaws fled.

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Captain Davis removed his shirt, tore it to strips, and began bandaging Dr. Sparks and the wounded brigands.  Suddenly Davis spotted three well-armed strangers coming up the trail. They turned out to be a John Webster and two members of a mining party camped a mile distant on a creek running into the North Fork of the American River.  They had been out hunting game and had seen the entire fight from a nearby hilltop.

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Someone examined Captain Davis's hat and found that at least six bullets had passed through it.  Participants in a gunfight may have tendency to shoot high, given that Davis had only two flesh wounds, but all of six holes in his hat.

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By nightfall the three badly wounded bandits had died.  In the morning McDonald and the ten dead robbers were buried.  The surviving bandit's wounds proved to be more serious than had been thought, and he died that day and was buried with the rest.

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John Webster and other miners formed a coroner's jury and prepared a long statement setting forth the facts of the affair.  They concluded, "From all the evidence before us, Captain Davis and his party acted solely in self-defence, and were perfectly justifiable in killing these robbers.  Too much praise cannot be bestowed upon them for having so gallantly stopped the wild career of these lawless ruffians."

Seventeen miners signed the report, which was then delivered to Placerville.  At the same time, John Webster wrote a long letter to a friend in Placerville offering his firsthand account ot the desperate battle in Rocky Canyon. The wounded Dr. Sparks was carried down the mountains to his home near Coloma by Captain Davis.  The doctor died on December 26.

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Sceptics.

The coroner's report and the letter from John Webster created a sensation in Placerville. The Placerville Mountain Democrat ran an extra edition on December 23, publishing both accounts in full.  The issue was reprinted by the San Francisco and Sacramento newspapers, and eventually by major newspapers in other parts of the country.  The story was considered so incredible that many doubted it. The San Francisco California Chronicle responded that "The story, though it might be considered certainly fabulous in any other country, is quite in character with things that often take place in California."

The three miners who had witnessed the fight, John Webster, Isaac Hart, and P.S. Robertson, had moved to new diggings twenty miles farther up the mountains.  They had had no contact with outsiders until they were visited by a Mr. Williams, a brother-in-law of Dr. Sparks, who had searched for them for several weeks before finding their camp. Williams wanted to confirm the details of Dr. Sparks' death, and he informed the three for the first time that their account had been discredited.

On March 20, 1855, three months after the battle, Captain Davis, Williams, and the three eyewitnesses appeared in the office of the Mountain Democrat.  Before Judge R.M. Anderson and a delegation of prominent citizens they recounted the battle in detail.  After careful questioning of Webster, Hart, and Robertson by Judge Anderson, those present were soon convinced that the fight had taken place exactly as described.  The three young miners presented letters of introduction and also gave a written statement about the battle.  Their testimony in this almost formal  setting settled all doubts in the public mind.

Concealed Firearms. Renaissance style.

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In 1522, the city of Ferrara in Italy forbad the carrying of crossbows or firearms into the city, day or night.  (The city ordinance specifically mentioned wheel locks which were mechanical and did not need a lighted fuse).

In 1523, the ordinances became more draconian:

..."and since an especially dangerous kind of firearms have come to be used, which are called vulgarly 'stone guns', (wheel locks) with which a homicide can easily be committed; in knowledge of this, His Excellency, knowing that these are devilish arms, prohibits their being carried without express authorization, under penalty of having a hand publicly cut off..."  ..."because these arms are being used more and more for murders and assassinations"...

Often however the ban came to be applied primarily to wheel locks that were short enough to be concealed in clothing.  Even these short firearms could usually be kept within the confines of the house; and longer firearms could be carried (as long as they were unloaded) from one's home to the city gates, at which point they were beyond the confines of the city and could be loaded.

This is 350 years before dodge City.

In Florence in 1547, the Duke of Florence forbad the carrying of firearms that were short enough to conceal.

Timeline - Leonardo Da Vinci died in 1519.

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In London the practice of taking potshots at birds was probably becoming dangerous to humans because of poor marksmanship of the shooter - or so it would seem from a Parliamentary ordinance of 1549:

...noe person under the degree of Lord in Parliament shall henceforth shote in any handgunne within any citie or towne at any fowle or other mark, upon anie church, house or dovecote, neither shal any person shote...any hayl-shot (bird shot) or any more pellets than one at a tyme, upon payne of tenne pounds...

The Year 1515. "I didn't know the gun was loaded".

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In the year of Our Lord 1515, on the day of the Three Holy Kings (January 6), there was a certain young citizen of Augsburg in Constance who invited a handsome whore, and when she was with him in a little room, he took up a loaded gun in his hand, the lock of which functioned in such a way that when the trigger was pressed, it ignited itself and so discharged the piece (a wheel lock).   Accordingly he played around with the gun and pressed the trigger and shot the whore through the chin, so that the bullet passed out through the back of her neck.  So he had to compensate her and give her 40 florins and another 20 florins per annum for life.  He also paid her doctor 37 florins, and the other costs amounted to some 30 or 40 florins.

From 'Chronica Newer Geschichten' by Wilhelm Ren, Under the title, 'How Laus Pfister Shot a Whore in Constance'

Bodie and Aurora, Mining Camps and Violence

Bodie is in California, and Aurora in Nevada.  A study of crime in these two mining towns offers a glimpse of life in the Old West.  The period for Aurora is the 1860's, after which Aurora became a ghost town and Bodie which boomed in the mid-1870's into the early 1880's.  The towns are ten miles apart.

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Nearly every man went about armed.

Sam Clemens, (the future Mark Twain) visited Bodie and spent some time in Aurora working as a miner and writing for the Esmeralda Star.  He said that he had never had occasion to kill anybody with the Colt Navy revolver he carried, but he had "worn the thing in deference to popular sentiment, and in order that I might not, by its absence, be offensively conspicuous, and a subject of remark."

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Thirty-one Bodieites and at least 17 Aurorans were victims of homicide during the towns' boom years.

Women residents of the towns were far safer than their counterparts are today in any American city. Men fought men with fists, knives, and guns, and they often fought to the death.  They occasionally fought over women or mining property, or even politics.  But mostly they  fought over who was the better man, real or imagined insults, and challenges to pecking order in the saloon.  The men involved in the fights were willing—often very willing—participants. Some of them were professionals, hired as gunmen for mining companies.  Others were simply miners, teamsters, bartenders, carpenters, woodchoppers, and the like.  The men were mostly young and single, and adventurous and brave.  The combination, sometimes laced with alcohol, led often to displays of reckless bravado and not infrequently to death.

In a study of violence in nineteenth-century Michigan lumber towns, Jeremy W. Kilar has found that there were some 112 homicides in the lumber counties of Bay, Saginaw, and Muskegon during the years 1868-1888.  More than half of the lumber town homicides occurred from 1881 through 1886.  In 1881, East Saginaw, with a population of some 20,000, had 15 homicides. 

The men of Aurora and Bodie were miners and ready to fight if the need arose.  Their consumption of alcohol meant that they would fight often. And their carrying of guns meant that fighting could easily prove fatal.

Although the armed state of the citizenry reduced the incidence of robbery, burglary, and theft, it also increased the number of homicides.

Residents of Aurora and Bodie accepted the killings because those killed, with only a few exceptions, had been willing combatants. They had chosen to fight.

Commenting on killings in Bodie, the Daily Free Press said on January 7, 1880: 'There has never yet been an instance of the intentional killing of a man whose taking off was not a verification of the proverb that "He that liveth by the sword shall perish by the sword.' "  The old and the weak, women and those unwilling to fight were almost never the object of an attack.

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Robbery.

Robbery occurred only infrequently.  There were eleven robberies and three attempted robberies of stages during Bodie's boom years and a nearly equal number during Aurora's heyday.

When highwaymen stopped a stagecoach, they normally took only the express box and left the passengers with their possessions intact.  Passengers frequently remarked that they had been treated courteously by the highwaymen.

Only twice were passengers robbed.  In the first instance the highwaymen later apologized for their conduct, and in the second the road agents were drunk.  Highwaymen seemed to understand that they could take the express box without arousing the general populace, but if they began robbing passengers they would possibly precipitate a vigilante reaction.

Bullion shipments carried occasionly by stagecoaches were often of great value: some of them would be worth $5 or $10 million in today's dollars.  Yet, not one of the bullion stages was ever attacked by highwaymen.

The reason is obvious.  The bullion stages, unlike the regular stages, were always guarded by two or three or more rifle and shotgun toting guards.  Highwaymen preferred to prey on unguarded coaches, take whatever was in the express box, and escape unharmed.

Only once did highwaymen and guards exchange gunfire - a highwayman was killed and a guard wounded - and in that case the highwaymen had not expected to encounter any guards.

Fear of arrest could not have served as much of a deterrent to stage robbery since only three road agents were ever apprehended, and only two of the three were convicted of robbery.

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Bank holdups, after stagecoach holdups, are the form of robbery most popularly associated with the frontier West; yet none of the several banks that operated in Aurora and Bodie were robbed.  Bankers went about armed, as did their employees, and robbers, like the highwaymen who avoided the guarded bullion stages, evidently were not willing to tangle with armed men.

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During this same periods there were ten robberies and three attempted robberies of individual citizens in Bodie and a somewhat smaller number in Aurora.

In nearly every one of these robberies the circumstances were almost identical: the robbery victim had spent the evening in a gambling den, saloon, or brothel; he had revealed in some way that he had on his person a tidy sum of money; and he was drunk, staggering toward home late at night when the attack occurred.

More robberies might have occurred if Aurorans and Bodieites had not gone about armed and ready to fight.  They were, unless staggering drunk, simply too dangerous to rob.

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Theft.

Theft was more common than robbery or burglary in Aurora and Bodie but still infrequent.  Bodie recorded some 45 instances of theft, and Aurora somewhat fewer.  Since both towns were high up in mountain valleys at elevations of 8,400 and 7,500 respectively, firewood and blankets were the items most commonly stolen.

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Horse thieves.

Of Bodie's 45 instances of theft only six involved horses.  Just two horse thieves were caught, and they were punished far less severely than has been traditionally supposed: one was sentenced to serve six months in the county jail, and the other a year in the state penitentiary.

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Rustling.

Although thousands of head of cattle grazed to the west of Bodie and Aurora in the Bridgeport Valley and to the south in the Owens Valley, cattle rustling, except for Indian thefts during the Owens Valley warfare of the 1860s, seems not to have occurred.

From 'Violence in America' edited by Ted Gurr.

Dodge City Homicide Statistics

Contrary to the impression left by Western movies, homicides were rare in the Wild West


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In 1880, wide-open towns like Virginia City, Leadville or Dallas had no homicides.  Compare this to Cincinnati, in the 'civilized' state of Ohio, which had 17 homicides in that same year.

Virginia city had 8 homicides during the year-and-half following its founding in 1859.  In 1876, the year of its birth, Deadwood had 4 homicides.  Ellsworth, one of the Kansas cattle towns, had 8 homicides during the twelve months following its establishment in 1867, and Dodge city, the queen of the cattle towns, had 9 in its first year, 1872-1873.  (Note: this number of nine homicdes from Frontier Violence: Another Look, author W. Eugene Hollon does not agree with the number given below.)

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From 1870 to 1885, the fabled cattle towns of Abilene, Caldwell, Dodge City, Ellsworth and Wichita had a total of 45 homicides between them - an average of three per year spread over five towns, or roughly one killing every one-and-half years per town.  Sixteen of these 45 homicides were committed by duly authorized peace officers.  Some of these were domestic quarrels.

The population of Dodge City was never much more than 3,000.  In its worst year (1876), Dodge City had 5 killings.  This translates to approximately 1 murder per 600 residents per year.  Remember, this is 'the worst year'.  To keep everything in perspective, consider that in Abilene, supposedly one of the wildest of the cow towns, not a single person was killed in 1869 or 1870.

One homicide per 600 residents would translate to 5000 homicides in a city the size of Chicago, with a population of approx. 3 million.


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Sounds awfully high, but it all depends on your perspective.

Most city suburbs have a population greater than 3000, and to have 5 killings in a small suburb of a size comparable to taht of Dodge city would be considered horrendous.

On the other hand, six or seven weekends in Chicago in 2012 can leave 45 homicides - it took 15 years and 5 cattle towns to reach that figure in the Wild West.  Then consider Cincinnati again which in one year (1880) had 18 homicides.

In conclusion it looks as if the Wild West was a relatively safe place to be.

Dunces and Supreme Court Justices

Given the intellectual and scholastic abilities of the justices of the United States Supreme Court, the term 'dunces' hardly seems applicable.  But what about by association:

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The 'Supreme Court Of The United States' is being referred to more and more by the media using the acronym "SCOTUS".


Lets look at John Duns Scotus (1265-1308).   He was one of the most important and influential philosopher-theologians of the High Middle Ages.  'Scotus’ was a nickname, identifying him as a Scot.  His family name was Duns, which was the name of the village where he was born.  His brilliantly complex and nuanced thought earned him the nickname 'Doctor Subtilis'.

Later philosophers in the sixteenth century were not as complimentary about his work, and accused him of sophistry.

In the 16th century, the followers of Scotus (Scotists or Dunses)) obstinately opposed the new learning (i.e., the King James Bible).  The term duns or dunce became in the mouths of the Protestants a term of abuse - someone who is incapable of scholarship.

So that's where the word "dunce' comes from.

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It just goes to show that when you're dead, your enemies make the rules and get to do the name calling. Consider Nero, Alexander, and even Judas Iscariot.

The Right Stuff, Astronauts and Actors

The movie The Right Stuff is about the first seven astronauts of the American Mercury program, and the great test pilot Chuck Yaeger. The following Popthems expand on some of the incidents shown in the movie.

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The first American to go into space was Alan Shepard played in the movie by Scott Glenn.   On May 5, 1961, 23 days after the Russians sent Yuri Gagarin into space, Shepard piloted the Freedom 7 mission.  Unlike Gagarin's 108-minute orbital flight, Shepard stayed on a ballistic trajectory (basically up and down)—a 15-minute suborbital flight which carried him to an altitude of 116 statute miles.

The euphoria that followed the flight may seem extravagant to us today given that the flight lasted only as long as the time it would take to eat a hamburger. But it meant a lot at the time.

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Shortly before the launch, Shepard said to himself: "Don't fuck up, Shepard..."  This quote was reported as "Dear Lord, please don't let me fuck up" in The Right Stuff, though Shepard confirmed this as a misquote.  The latter quote has since become known among aviators as "Shepard's Prayer."

He nearly 'fucked up'.  When he tried to observe the scene below him, he noticed that he had forgotten to remove the grey filter from the periscope.  He tried to remove it, but as he reached for the filter knob the pressure gauge on his left wrist banged into the abort handle.  He carefully pulled his hand away without removing the filter.  He observed the wondrous sights below through the grey slide, but still said "What a beautiful view!"

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According to Gene Kranz in his book, Failure Is Not an Option, when reporters asked Shepard what he thought about as he sat atop the Redstone rocket, waiting for liftoff, he replied, "The fact that every part of this ship was built by the low bidder".

After a dramatic Atlantic Ocean recovery,  Shepard observed "It's not the fall that hurts; it's the sudden stop".

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During the pre-launch countdown a small electrical part had a problem and this resulted in an hour and twenty six minute delay.  Shepard was on top of the Redstone rocket for so long now that he had to urinate.

The liquid pooled in the small of his back. His heavy undergarment soaked up the urine, and with 100 percent oxygen flowing through the suit he was soon dry.  The countdown resumed.

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The name "Freedom Seven" was Alan Shepard's choice. "Freedom" because it was patriotic and "Seven" because it was the seventh Mercury capsule produced. It also represented the seven Mercury astronauts. To help relieve any tension Shepard might have built up before his flight, Glenn pasted a little sign on the spacecraft instrument panel, reading "No handball playing here." This bit of humor hearkened back to their training days.

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Ten years later, at age 47 the oldest astronaut in the program, Shepard commanded the Apollo 14 mission, piloting the lander to the most accurate landing of the Apollo missions. He became the fifth person to walk on the Moon, and the only one of the seven Mercury astronauts to walk on the moon. During the mission he hit two golf balls on the lunar surface.

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On July 21, 1961, Gus Grissom was pilot of the second Project Mercury flight, popularly known as Liberty Bell 7.   He was played by Fred Ward.

The flight was a suborbital flight and lasted 15 minutes and 37 seconds.  After splashdown, emergency explosive bolts unexpectedly fired and blew the hatch off, causing water to flood into the spacecraft.   Grissom asserted he had done nothing to cause the hatch to blow.  In the movie we are led to believe that Grissom had panicked and and blown the cover off.  This is what the NASA engineers are shown in the movie to believe.

In reality NASA officials eventually concluded that Grissom was correct.  Initiating the explosive egress system required hitting a metal trigger with the side of a closed fist, which unavoidably left a large, obvious bruise on the astronaut's hand, but Grissom was found not to have any of the tell-tale bruising.  Fellow Mercury astronaut Wally Schirra, at the end of his October 3, 1962 flight, remained inside his spacecraft until it was safely aboard the recovery ship, and made a point of deliberately blowing the hatch to get out, bruising his hand.

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Gus Grissom died on January 27, 1967 when he and two other astronauts burned to death in the command capsule during a pre-launch test.  An investigation revealed a wide range of lethal hazards.  These were fixed and the Apollo program reached its objective of landing men on the Moon.

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John Glenn was played by Ed Harris.  He was the first American to orbit the Earth, aboard Friendship 7 on February 20, 1962,





What were those mysterious 'fireflies' that Glenn saw during his orbital flight?  The mystery was solved later that year, when another Mercury astronaut, Scott Carpenter, made his orbital flight aboard Aurora 7.  Carpenter also reported seeing the particles, and to him they looked like snowflakes.  Carpenter was close to the truth.  They were bits of frozen condensation on the capsules’ exterior that broke off as the capsule moved through areas of varying temperatures.