By The Writer

Originally published in the Plainsman Herald, Springfield, Colorado, June 19, 2024

“An elderly gentleman on his way to Colorado was asked what there was attractive there, and answered ‘Nothing sir, but a dry burying ground and shorter route to Heaven” 

–The Ashland Weekly Journal, 1887

No one has really questioned my book’s premise that the town of Old Boston Colorado was as “Wild As They Come.”  I never have officially compared any of the craziness that occurred in that place to any other place in the old west. However, a recent article in the Smithsonian Magazine Online, by Matt Jancer made me think again: Did we get the history correct? Did Southeast Colorado really have the bloodiest town in the history of the Wild West?

 Jancer references data from a book published in 1974 (and a few other times later) by Robert Dykstra, The Cattle Towns in which he essentially questions the “shoot em up” legends of the towns of the “Wild West.”   Jancer states, “Crime records in the Old West are sketchy, and even where they exist the modern FBI yardstick of measuring homicides rates – the number of homicides per 100,000 residents – can exaggerate statistics in Old Western towns with small populations; even one or two more murders a year would drastically swing a town’s homicide rate.

Historian Robert Dykstra focused on established cattle towns, recording homicides after a full season of cattle shipments had already passed and by which time they’d have typically passed firearm law. He found a combined 45 murders from 1870-1885 in Kansas’ five largest cattle towns by the 1880 census: Wichita (population: 4,911), Abilene (2,360) Caldwell (1,005), Ellsworth (929), and Dodge City (996).

Averaged out, there were 0.6 murders per town, per year. The worst years were Ellsworth, 1873, and Dodge City, 1876, with five killings each; because of their small populations, their FBI homicide rates would be high. Another historian, Rick Shenkman, found Tombstone’s (1880 pop: 3,423) most violent year was 1881, in which also only five people were killed; three were the cowboys shot by Earp’s men at the OK Corral.”

By 1887 many of the wild towns of the old west such as Dodge City had implemented firearm ordinances which is supported by the following news clippings:

We can easily move beyond surmise at the attempts by the Boston town founders to build a civil and cultured existence in an environment that seemed to produce anything but civility with this clipping from Sam Konkel’s Western World newspaper, reprinted in the The Citizen (Trinidad Colorado) 28 Dec 1887—

Their attempts at taming the “noted burying ground” as it was described in the following news clipping seems like a futile exercise as we look back with 20/20 hindsight.  

We do know Boston, Colorado existed from November of 1886 to April of 1889.  It  did not exist during any census period, so there is our first data challenge.   The population of Boston was estimated to be anywhere from 500 to 1500 persons during its heyday.  

There is documentation for  three Boston shootings  in 1887 ( a saloon keeper, Newt Bradly and Henry Savoy)  and the shooting of Henry Booth by a man named Hickman in 1888. The only documented grave in the Boston Cemetery with a connection to the story of Old Boston is Barney Wright.  If you read the book you might remember Wright was actually shot in Vilas, taken to Boston and subsequently expired in Boston.  

So with sketchy data, surmise,  and a simple online death rate calculator, we march forward with the idea Boston Colorado may have been the bloodiest town in the history of the old West.  If there were 17 shootings and one lynching and we wildly guess that half of those occurred in 1887 and half in 1888 then that is 9 per year– which makes Boston shooting related deaths almost double the numbers from Ellsworth and Dodge City during their highest tally for a year  of shooting deaths.  

Garden City Sentinel (Garden City, Kansas) · 29 Sep 1888 

Can we prove any of this?  Not really; we do know that Al Jennings, who in later years talked about his wild outlaw days a lot, didn’t talk about Boston so much.  There is a brief derogatory mention of  the town in the 1913 Saturday Evening Post article about Jennings.  There also is plenty of evidence as shown above of a willingness to use firearms. 

If you use the line from the movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance then maybe we have all we need to know, “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”