BEAR RIVER TOM: NEGLECTED GUNSLINGER

The Frontierado holiday is coming up this Friday, August 7th. As the holiday approaches and we are all making our preparations enjoy another seasonal post. 

Bear River Tom

BEAR RIVER TOM – That’s our neglected gunslinger in the photo to your left. One of the few actual gunmen to wear a fancy two-gun holster, Bear River Tom Smith’s tale begins with his birth in 1838 in New York City. He either did or did not serve in the Union Army in 1861 (accounts vary) but was definitely part of the NYC police force by 1862. By 1867 he headed west, working as a laborer laying track for the Union Pacific Railroad in Nebraska.

By 1868 the crew he was with had reached Wyoming, where the Hell On Wheels town of Bear River sprang up around their work camp. Bear River was to wild, lawless railroad towns what Dodge City, Kansas was to wild, lawless cattletowns.

Bear River Tom put his guns, fists and law enforcement experience to work protecting the town’s citizens from the drunken excesses of the railroad workers and the railroad workers from the Vigilante mobs the Bear River inhabitants had formed to curb the lawlessness. 

This twin conflict became threeway when the railroad tycoons began sending in strike-breaking thugs to bust the heads of any laborers trying to organize a union. Legend holds that Tom had shot 14 men dead and left many more wounded by the time everything came to a head in the Bear River Riot of 1868. Some laborers were (supposedly falsely) imprisoned in the Bear River jail.

Tom and some fellow railroad workers invaded the town and amid prolonged exchanges of gunfire with Vigilantes and strike- breakers freed their coworkers, destroyed the jail and trashed the anti-labor newspaper. Bear River Tom himself was severely wounded and order was restored only by the arrival of troops from Fort Bridger. 

Tom recovered from his wounds, gave up drinking forever as he promised God to do if he lived, and continued protecting the railroad workers as construction continued westward into Utah. On May 10th, 1869, at Promontory Point, the Transcontinental Railroad was completed and Bear River Tom signed on with the Kansas Pacific Railroad to protect laborers and townspeople from each other in Colorado.

In May of 1870 Smith became a traditional town Marshall for violent and lawless Abilene, Kansas and tamed it by enforcing the local ordinance that only he could carry firearms in town. Wyoming Frank and Big Hank were the first two Kansas outlaws to fall to Abilene’s new Marshall but were far from the last. 

Eventually, by November of that same year Bear River Tom tried to bring in the murderous gunslingers Moses Miles and Andrew McConnell but was shot down with rifle fire from his quarries, who finished off the dying man with an axe. Abilene returned to its lawless ways until Wild Bill Hickok himself replaced Bear River Tom Smith as Marshall in the spring of 1871.