CALIFORNIA JIM – The Frontierado Holiday is coming up on Friday, August 4th, so here is another blog post in honor of the season. California Jim was also known as Six-Shooter Jim Smith and Six-Shooter Bill, but on his deathbed, he claimed that his real name was John Henry Hankins (some sources say Jankins or Hawkins).
A large part of California Jim’s history is known only from that deathbed confession, with periodic news reports or journals offering supplementary information. Jim was born around 1856 in either Texas or Missouri, depending on which source you go by.
In his teens, California Jim supposedly went to California, where he spent some of the 1870s pulling off masked robberies of gold shipments and mine payrolls. By 1877 or 1878, this man had wandered back to Texas, where he shot to death a man in Cooke County and took it on the run.
Jim lingered in Dodge City, Kansas for a time, committing various crimes. On August 17th, 1878 Deputy Marshal Bat Masterson himself arrested California Jim for stealing a horse.
For unknown reasons, our gunslinger was not sentenced over this crime and continued fraternizing with other Dodge City desperadoes like Dirty Dave Rudabaugh and Mysterious Dave Mather. The summer of 1879 saw plenty of Dodge City criminals, California Jim among them, gravitate to newly thriving Las Vegas, New Mexico where they joined Hoodoo Brown’s organized crime outfit. Continue reading
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