Bear River Tom: The Marshal Who Used His Fists

Before Wild Bill Hickok became Abilene's most famous lawman, another man tried to bring order to the cattle town with strikingly different methods, and his story is in many ways the more remarkable one. His name was Tom Smith, and the trail cowboys called him Bear River Tom, after a riot he had reportedly quelled in a Wyoming railroad camp. He was appointed Abilene's marshal in June of eighteen seventy.

Smith had a philosophy unusual for his time and occupation. He preferred to enforce the firearms ordinance with his fists rather than his gun. He would ride into a crowd of armed Texas cowboys, demand their weapons, and if they refused, he would knock them down with his bare hands until they reconsidered.

His contemporaries and the local newspapers described this approach with a mixture of astonishment and admiration. It worked. During his months on the job, gun violence in Abilene dropped sharply, and Tom Smith earned a reputation as one of the most effective frontier peace officers in Kansas.

But frontier law enforcement was dangerous even for men who avoided gunplay. On the second of November, eighteen seventy, Smith rode out to arrest a homesteader named Andrew McConnell on a murder warrant. McConnell and a neighbor named Miles ambushed Smith.

He was shot and then killed with an ax in a brutal attack that shocked the territory. Tom Smith served as Abilene's marshal for five months. He tamed a cattle town with his hands and was killed by a farmer.

His grave in Abilene's Mud Creek Cemetery bears an epitaph calling him a fearless hero of frontier days. His story is usually told as a prelude to Wild Bill Hickok's. It deserves to stand on its own.