On November 14, 1882, gunslinger Franklin
"Buckskin" Leslie shoots Billy Claiborne dead in the streets of
Tombstone, Arizona. The town of Tombstone is best known today as the site of
the infamous shootout at the O.K. Corral. In the 1880s, however, Tombstone was
home to many gunmen who never achieved the enduring fame of Wyatt Earp or Doc
Holliday. Franklin "Buckskin" Leslie was one of the most notorious of
these largely forgotten outlaws.
There are few surviving details about Leslie's early
life. At different times, he claimed to have been born in both Texas and
Kentucky, to have studied medicine in Europe, and to have been an army scout in
the war against the Apache Indians. No evidence has ever emerged to support or
conclusively deny these claims. The first historical evidence of Leslie's life
emerges in 1877, when he became a scout in Arizona. A few years later, Leslie
was attracted to the moneymaking opportunities of the booming mining town of
Tombstone, where he opened the Cosmopolitan Hotel in 1880. That same year he
killed a man named Mike Killeen during a quarrel over Killeen's wife, and he
married the woman shortly thereafter.
Leslie's reputation as a cold-blooded killer brought him
trouble after his drinking companion and fellow gunman John Ringo was found
dead in July 1882. Some Tombstone citizens, including a young friend of Ringo's
named Billy Claiborne, were convinced that Leslie had murdered Ringo, though
they could not prove it. Probably seeking vengeance and the notoriety that
would come from shooting a famous gunslinger, Claiborne unwisely decided to
publicly challenge Leslie, who shot him dead. The remainder of Leslie's life
was equally violent and senseless. After divorcing Killeen in 1887, he took up
with a Tombstone prostitute, whom he murdered several years later during a
drunken rage. Even by the loose standards of frontier law in Tombstone, the
murder of an unarmed woman was unacceptable, and Leslie served nearly 10 years
in prison before he was paroled in 1896. After his release, he married again
and worked a variety of odd jobs around the West. He reportedly made a small
fortune in the gold fields of the Klondike region before he disappeared forever
from the historical record.
Michael Thomas Barry is a
columnist for CrimeMagazine.com and is the author of Murder and Mayhem 52 Crimes that
Shocked Early California
1849-1949. The book can be purchased from Amazon through the
following link:
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