“BIG STEVE” LONG: NEGLECTED GUNSLINGER

The Frontierado Holiday falls on Friday, August 1st this year. As regular readers know, Frontierado celebrates the myth of the old west, not the grinding reality. Here’s a seasonal post. 

BIG STEVE LONG – Like many gunslingers of the American West, Steve Long served in the Civil War, in his case on the Confederate side. After the war, Long gravitated westward as a gunman for hire, temporary lawman and bounty hunter. 

In 1866, now known as Big Steve, Long settled in Laramie, WY where he befriended Ace and Con Moyer, two members of one of the Laramie founding families. Big Steve, Ace and Con established a tent saloon that they called Keystone Hall.

In addition to running the saloon, Ace served as Justice of the Peace and Con was Town Marshal. Long and the Moyers ran a growing criminal empire out of Keystone Hall, with Big Steve as their chief enforcer. After only a couple months in town, Long had already shot down a half dozen or so men in fair(ish) gunfights in the tent saloon.

With even the shadier residents of Laramie becoming disgruntled over Big Steve’s hair trigger, the Moyers brothers named him their Deputy Marshal in 1867. Now having the facade of legality over his shootings, Long threw his and the Moyers’ weight around even more. 

Two months and eight more gunfight victims later, Big Steve, Ace and Con were pretty openly running a gangster operation out of their saloon. Keystone Hall’s “games of chance” were anything but, and the three men at the top raked in money from the rigged roulette wheels, loaded dice and crooked card games. 

Gamblers who lost big were met with privately by Long and forced to sign over deeds to land or claims to precious metal strikes to pay off their debts to the House. Not all of the victims of Big Steve and company were honest or innocent, of course. Cheating gamblers and outlaws wanting a piece of Keystone Hall’s profits also fell to the guns of Long and the Moyers.

By October of 1868 thirteen to twenty more people had been added to the pile of dead bodies left by the criminals, with Big Steve leading the charge. Life in Keystone Hall was so notoriously cheap by now that it was nicknamed the Bucket of Blood.

Laramie rancher N.K. Broswell and other local businessmen and landowners formed a vigilante group in opposition to Long and the Moyers since those criminals WERE the law in the area. Big Steve survived attempts on his life by masked individuals and even started committing freelance holdups to further show off his contempt for the community.

On October 18th, 1868, Long tried holding up prospector Rollie Harrison but Rollie wouldn’t back down and in the resulting exchange of gunfire, Harrison wound up dead and Big Steve was seriously wounded. 

Long managed to reach Keystone Hall, but the enraged citizens had finally had enough. With N.K. Broswell in the lead, a mob burst into the tent saloon, dragged Long and the Moyers outside and lynched them.

Some versions of these events depict Big Steve asking those hanging him to take off his boots since his mother had often given him the cliched warning about “dying with his boots on.”