LONG HENRY: NEGLECTED GUNSLINGER. HAPPY FRONTIERADO 2023!

HAPPY FRONTIERADO! The first Friday of every August marks this holiday devoted to the myth of the old west rather than the grinding reality. For some of us the celebration kicks off Thursday night, for others they wait until the actual day of Frontierado to hold their festivities. Enjoy your buffalo steaks, rattlesnake fried rice, corn on the cob, tumbleweed pizza, cactus salad and more today and tonight, and enjoy the leftovers on Saturday and Sunday.

LONG HENRY – Henry Thompson aka Henry Pell was born in 1866 in the Texas Panhandle. His mother was Cherokee, and his father was a white soldier or, by some accounts, a freight driver. Long Henry referred to his mother having to use a bread board for his cradle because of how poor their family was.

Of his father, the gunslinger stated that the man fought Native Americans and outlaws, but no details have come down to us. In his teens, Long Henry joined up with the Henry Starr Gang, taking part in rustling and armed robberies of banks, trains, post offices, and general stores.

The Starr Gang ran their rustling operations in Texas, Indian Territory, Mexico and Arkansas. Eventually, the law nearly nabbed Thompson in the form of Sheriff James McCarthy and his Deputy Thomas White. Long Henry shot both of them dead and crossed the border into Mexico for a few years.

By 1892 Thompson was back in Texas to participate in a Slaughter-Kyle “Long S” Brand cattle drive to Montana. Afterwards, Long Henry drifted back into rustling, this time in Montana and Wyoming during the years when the Hole in the Wall gangs were gaining in notoriety.

When our man felt like obeying the law, he worked as a legit cowboy for assorted ranches, among them the Home Land and Cattle Company, one of the N Bar N ranches owned by the Neidringhouse Brothers. This was where he supposedly first met the Sundance Kid.

From his Texas days onward, Long Henry had been leaving behind him a line of dead bodies from the many gunfights he engaged in. Most recently, Thompson had gunned down John Gallman in Wendover, WY and a man in Chadron, NE whose name has not come down to us. One occasion in which our gunslinger didn’t feel the need to draw was when he ran up against Kid Flannagan in the autumn of 1892.

The Kid got drunk and was picking a fight with the more notorious Long Henry. Legend has it that at one point Kid Flannagan pulled his gun and shoved the barrel into Henry’s stomach, but the unimpressed Thompson told the Kid that they both knew he wasn’t going to pull the trigger.

Things ended with Long Henry seizing the pistol from Kid Flannagan’s hands and telling him to go get some sleep. He gave the gun back to the Kid when he had sobered up the next day.

In September of 1894 Thompson gunned down a fellow N Bar N cowboy and cook named George Dunman. This happened in Fallon, MT near Miles City with Dunman atop his horse and with his rifle aimed at our man over a clash in Dynamite Hanson’s Saloon.

Long Henry was jailed for roughly three months over the Dunman slaying until he was found Not Guilty by reason of self-defense and released. November 1895 saw our man lapse back into his criminal ways when he participated in the armed robbery of the Glasgow (Montana) Bank.

Thompson and his two accomplices were foiled by a time-lock on the main vault and fled with a mere $145 from the tellers. A posse pursued the trio but lost them in a snowstorm.

Not long afterward, Long Henry and Jack Dawson were arrested at Charles Hall’s sheep ranch along Porcupine Creek, while the third robber, Armond Broome, was arrested at his brother’s saloon in Glasgow.

Broome’s well off family was able to pay his bail, but Thompson and Dawson stayed in jail until the trial started in Fort Benton in August 1896. On Day One, Judge J.W. Tattan dismissed the charges over insufficient evidence.

Reportedly, Long Henry remained affiliated with the spoiled Armond Broome and even rustled cattle with Armond’s gang.

May of 1897 found Thompson partnering with his former Starr Gang colleague Ed Starr (Henry Starr’s brother) to purchase 77 horses. Alongside the 19-year-old Ed Shufelt they took the horses to North Dakota to sell them.

That venture had proven profitable enough that Long Henry, Shufelt and Starr remained partners in several more such deals for the rest of 1897 and into 1898. On August 6th of that year, various tensions that had been building between Thompson and Ed Starr reached the boiling point.

There are at least a half-dozen stories that provide reasons for the feud, but no matter which one was the truth, August 6th, 1898 saw Long Henry and Ed Starr eschew gunplay for a knife duel in which each of them bit down on either end of a long neckerchief to keep them in close proximity to each other.

Thompson won, killing Starr and finding himself behind bars once again. Armond Broome, the lone witness to the fight, testified that Long Henry had acted in self-defense (?) and our man was acquitted. Broome then married Ed Starr’s widow Della, thus adding her and her late husband’s holdings to his own.

Henry Thompson spent the following months alternating between honest jobs and criminal activities in Montana locales like Saco, Jordan and Hinsdale. Some accounts claim that Long Henry ran a horse theft ring out of a secret spread along Crooked Creek.

Much talk had spread that Armond Broome had simply paid Thompson to kill Ed Starr so he could marry his widow, Della. His eyewitness testimony that it was self-defense then got Long Henry released and paid the $1,000.00 reward on Ed Starr’s head. (He had been living in Montana under the name Tom Dunn.)

In 1899, while on a legitimate cattle drive, Henry was struck by lightning but survived and soon recovered. This prompted him to hubristically boast that “I guess none of those gunmen can kill me and God Almighty will have to load His gun a little heavier if He does business with me.”

On Christmas Day of the year 1900, Long Henry got drunk and shot up the town of Saco. In January 1901 the charges were dismissed for lack of witnesses willing to testify. February 7th, 1901 found Thompson arrested in Glasgow over threats he had made against Armond Broome.

Broome’s connections made it so that our man was released on a very unusual bond of $500.00 pending him going a full year with no further clashes with Armond.

Long Henry apparently took that one-year period very literally. On February 14th, 1902 Thompson rode into Saco, MT, by some accounts to settle things with Armond Broome once and for all.

He entered the Valley Saloon, owned by his former partner Ed Shufelt, and Andy Duffy. The saloon was holding an all-night dance in honor of Valentine’s Day and since Broome was not in town Long Henry passed the night dancing with Saloon Girl Georgia Grant.

Georgia Grant’s services were so good that Thompson and Shufelt often vied for her good graces, and this time things ended in a physical fight between the two men. Long Henry stalked away to Frank Stevens’ Saloon & Restaurant, where he drank until the morning of February 15th.

Around that time Thompson returned to the Valley Saloon, where Ed Shufelt and others were just cleaning up following the all-night event. Shufelt and three of his friends shot it out with Long Henry, Ed from the front and his friends from the rear.

Henry Thompson fell down dead from nine bullet wounds and was buried in Saco’s Grandview Cemetery.