3/16/1903 - The legendary life of Wild West character, Phantly Roy Bean Jr., comes to a surprisingly peaceful end when the former judge dies from pneumonia in his Langtry saloon at the age of 78 after a bout of heavy weekend drinking in the town of San Antonio and exposure to a sleet storm while chasing a group of cattle rustlers.
Bean
The youngest of five children, Bean Jr. is born to Phantly Roy Bean Sr. and the former Anna Henderson Gore in Mason County, Kentucky. An extremely poor family, when the youngest Bean is only fifteen, he leaves home, rides a flatboat to New Orleans and after getting into trouble with Louisiana authorities, joins his teamster and bullwhacker elder brother Sam in San Antonio, Texas. In 1848, the pair open up at trading post in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, but the endeavor is soon left behind when the men are forced to flee west into Sonora, Mexico after Roy kills a Mexican desperado that had been throwing threats about town on how he would soon be killing a "gringo." The live "gringo" next shows up in 1849 in the Pacific Coast town of San Diego, where he lives in the home of another brother, Joshua (the last Mexican alcalde of San Diego, when the town is incorporated by the California State Legislature in 1850, Bean becomes the first duly elected U.S. mayor of the city, he leaves town and heads north when he is caught illegally selling the town's city hall and some local pueblo lands to himself and his drinking buddy, Lt. Cave J. Couts). Shortly after arriving in San Diego, Roy is in trouble with the authorities again after he engages in a marksmanship contest on horseback against a Scotsman named John Collins. Choosing to shoot at each other instead of at stationary targets, Collins is wounded in the right arm but survives the encounter. Both men arrested and charged with assault with intent to murder, considered handsome and good catch as a youth, Roy receives wine, food, cigars, and flowers from the local ladies as he languishes in jail, languishes that is until he discovers one lovely senorita has hidden a set of knives in the tamales that have been gifted to Bean, knives the captive uses to dig through his cell wall to freedom on April 17, 1852. Riding north, Roy joins up with his brother Joshua again, this time tending bar for the older Bean at his new enterprise, a drinking establishment and store in the town of Mission San Gabriel called the "Headquarters Saloon." When 34-year-old Joshua is murdered after getting into an argument about a local lady, Roy inherits the bar, but once more has to flee a successful business when he lets his horniness do his thinking. In 1854, after courting a local woman who has been promised to an officer in the Mexican Army, Bean challenges the officer to a duel and kills the man, an outcome that is unsatisfactory to six of the dead man's friend, who put Roy on horse and tie a rope around his neck that will set him dancing on air once the horse moves. And move she does, but before Bean can die, the Mexican girl comes out of hiding and cuts Roy down. Fleeing town and then California with a permanent rope burn souvenir around his neck (to go along with a stiff neck that will plague him the rest of his life), Roy migrates to New Mexico where his brother Sam has now become the first duly elected sheriff of Dona Ana County. By 1861, the brothers are operating a combination saloon and store in the Grant County town of Pinos Altos (just north of the town of Silver City) ... advertised as serving liquor and having "a fine billiard table," it is an establishment that Roy decorates with a personal working cannon he places just outside the front door of the store for show (an accoutrement that will come in handy driving off a band of 200 Membreno & Chiricahua Apaches led by Mangas Coloradas and Cochise later in the same year, when the weapon is loaded with nails and fired as the hostiles invade the front door of the store).
Joshua Bean
Mission San Gabriel
Pinos Altos
A Southern sympathizer through and through, when the American Civil War starts, Bean begins supplying the Confederate Army of Brigadier General Henry Hopkins Sibley, especially after it's supply wagons are seized and the army retreats back into Texas following it's disastrous loss in New Mexico at the Battle of Glorieta Pass (known to historians as the "Gettysburg of the West"). Helping himself to money from his brother Sam's safe, Roy returns to Texas and sets up a supply business in San Antonio. For the remainder of the war, Bean will help the South and line his own pockets by running the Union's naval blockade of Texas, hauling bundles of cotton to British off the coast of Matamoros, Mexico and then returning to town with urgently needed supplies. When the conflict ends in 1865, Bean remains in San Antonio and tries his hand at a variety of businesses over the next twenty years ... his lumber enterprise will fall apart when it is discovered that Bean's inventory has come from chopping down the trees of a neighbor, his dairy business craters when it is discovered that Bean is watering down the milk his cows give with moisture from a local stream (caught when minnows are found swimming in some of Bean's leche, the flim-flam artist tries to con his way out of his troubles by claiming he needs to stop the cows from drinking so much minnow tainted water), and his butcher shop fails when it is discovered Bean has been rustling cattle from the ranches of his San Antonio neighbors. In San Antonio, Bean also tries his hand at being a family man, marrying the sixteen-year-old daughter (Virginia) of a respected local rancher, Leandro Chavez, on October 28, 1866. Settling in a poor section of San Antonio called "Beanville," the honeymoon soon ends for the couple with Roy arrested for aggravated assault and threatening Virginia's life in 1867 (despite their tumultuous marriage, the union will produce four children ... Roy Jr. (1866), Laura (1872), Zulema (1874), and Sam (1875), and the couple also adopt a boy named John. His marriage just as big a failure as his business cons, Bean decides to vacate San Antonio and set up shop to the west, in one of the railroad towns springing up along the trestles of the westward heading Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railroad (called the Sunset Route, the tracks start in New Orleans and then moves across the Chiuahuan Desert of West Texas, the tracks sharing the scorching land with rattlesnakes, bobcats, and scorpions as they head into El Paso. Separated and then divorced by Virginia (the children have been farmed out to a San Antonio couple, Mr. and Mrs. Simon Fest, Jr.), running another saloon/store in Beanville, in the spring of 1882, with a nest egg of $900 (provided by a local businesswomen that wants Roy out of town so badly that she buys out his entire inventory) Bean buys a large tent, supplies, and ten 55-gallon barrels of whiskey and follows the railroad tracks west to a grading camp called Eagle Nest (in turn, the spot on the map will be called Vinegarron by Bean for the whip scorpions abounding in the area that emit a "vinegar" smell when alarmed, and then Langtry, when the town moves a short distance away for the engineer, George Langtry, who supervises the teams of Chinese workers building the railroad).
Battle Of Glorieta Pass
Virginia Chavez Bean
Historical Marker
Located in Val Verde County near where the Rio Grande and Pecos Rivers come together (most of the desert land is owned by the railroad or rancher Cezario Torres), what becomes the unincorporated town of Langtry, Texas will sit at an elevation of 1,289 feet above sea level and only average 14 inches of rain a year (from May to September the town averages a daily high temperature of 95.2 degrees). It's population will never grow much beyond a population of a few hundred residents, but within twenty miles of the city limits when Bean arrives can be found almost 10,000 railroad workers, cowboys, gamblers, and outlaws (the moves to Vinegaroon and then Langtry are made after the saloon he opens in the town of Strawbridge fails, due in large part to a competitor lacing Bean's inventory with kerosene). The nearest court being located at Fort Stockton, 135 miles away to the southeast (San Antonio is 186 miles away, Austin is 231 miles away, Dallas is 348 miles away, and Houston is 371 miles away), on July 5, 1882, the day after America's Independence Day is celebrated, Texas Ranger Captain Thomas L. Oglesby writes to his commanding officer, Adjutant General Wilburn H. King, that the region needs to have a magistrate appointed to adjudicate the laws of the state. It is unknown what strings Bean pulls, but with host of offenses on his record over the years, and no formal training whatsoever as a judge or lawyer, Bean is somehow given the job (when deemed necessary, he will consult the one law book he has, the 1879 edition of the Revised Statutes of Texas), with first his tent and then a permanent store and saloon, The Jersey Lilly (named after Bean's boyhood crush, entertainer Emilie Charlotte Le Breton of the English isle of Jersey, better known to the world as Lillie Langtry, eventually, Bean builds a home across the street from his saloon, anticipating that someday Langtry will perform in Langtry at his home, and names his abode The Opera House), and it's denizens, serving as a courthouse filled with potential jurors as they are needed. With no jail to speak of in town, most cases are settled with fines (most of the time for whatever amount of money the guilty party has on them, or if money is not available, by being assigned with working, "community service," about town), and when matters are more serious, the convicted individual is shackled to a post outside Bean's bar with a heavy log chain (some are also tied to the town's only tree, a large oak near the judge's saloon. Only twice during Bean's career as a judge will a defendant be sentenced to hang, and that sentence is never carried out, the other time, the prisoner frees himself from the post and vanishes into the desert. Calling himself and his court the "Only Law West Of The Pecos," Bean becomes a justice of the peace on August 2, 1882 (with a brief hiatus in 1886, when Bean loses an election, he will be Langtry's magistrate until 1896).
The Jersey Lilly - Bean Is On Porch In Sombrero Hat
Langtry
The eccentric court that Bean runs in Langtry will eventually make the judge into a Wild West legend (long after his death, actor Walter Brennan will win his third Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 1940 for playing the judge opposite Gary Cooper in The Westerner, actor Victor Jory will be Bean in the 1969 film A Time For Dying, and Academy Award winning actor Paul Newman will play Bean in the 1972 comedy The Life And Times Of Judge Roy Bean ... and thus far on TV, he will be portrayed over the years by actors Edgar Buchanan, Frank Ferguson, Peter Whitney, Tom Skerritt, Billy Beck, Tommy Duggan, Andy Griffith, Brad Sullivan, and Ned Beatty). Among the strange moments for the Law West of the Pecos are (one of the first things Bean does upon accepting his appointment is to shoot up the saloon of a rival Jewish businessman):
*When an Irishman named Paddy O'Rourke is put on trial after killing a Chinese laborer, 200 of the man's angry friends threaten Bean with mayhem, so he consults his law book and can find no law within stating it is illegal to kill a Chinaman ... and presto, the crowd breaks up when Bean announces the case is dismissed.
*When new law books are sent to Bean, he uses them not to upgrade the jurisprudence he is offering, but instead uses the books as kindling for the stove in his saloon.
*When a Southern Pacific railroad worker falls to his death from the company's bridge over the Pecos River, Bean finds the death accidental, but fines the corpse the $40 he is carrying for also carrying a concealed revolver (which the judge of course confiscates and from then on uses as a gavel during court proceedings).
*When a train passenger stops at Bean's bar for a beer and pays his five cent tab with a $20 gold piece, Bean refuses to make change for the man and fines him instead ... $19.95 for contempt of court and the threat that the contempt fees will double if the passenger keeps protesting the decision ... which he doesn't, leaving town as soon as the train he came in on is ready to continue west.
*Though not legally allowed to grant divorces (the job of a district court), Bean does anyway, charging $10 for every parting he oversees.
*When a rival barkeep is found guilty of assault by a six-man jury and fined two dozen bottles of beer, Bean rules that the fine must be paid in Jersey Lilly beer.
*When a railroad contractor with some knowledge of the law comes to Bean's court and wins a case using the latest Texas statutes, Bean bans law books from being used henceforth during proceedings of his court.
*During quiet periods where no train tourists are in his bar, Bean often sits on the porch of his saloon shooting off a shotgun while yelling "cold beer" ... the bar usually fills up shortly afterwards.
*Like divorce, marriages are not a function of Bean's court, but for $5 he ties the knot for many couples anyway (also the town coroner, he charges a $10 burial fee for each body that comes his way) and ends each ceremony by stating, "... and may God have mercy on your souls."
*Owed money by a local restaurant owner who is late in paying, Bean sets up outside the door to the eating establishment at its busiest time, and charges everyone for their meals until the money he is owed, plus interest, is all paid.
*Fake hangings are often held by Bean to scare others into swiftly paying their fines, and horse theft charges are often remedied, after fines, by allowing the culprits to escape back to wherever they came from in the first place.
*Informed by a district attorney in Del Rio that he is not authorized to grant divorces, Bean gets the lawyer into a poker game. Down $230 to Bean, Bean is willing to forgive the debt if the attorney will never mention the matter of divorces again ... and he never does.
*A common fine in Bean's court is that the offender found guilty has to buy a round of drinks for the judge, jury, and anyone else in the Jersey Lilly.
*Popping $2 fines on drunk and disorderly miscreants from the weekend, the judge uses Mondays to clear his docket of pending cases, sending the guilty on their way with words warning them to get out of his bar and not to come back again.
*Bar patrons conned into contributions to help a crippled stranger, when it is discovered that the man's afflictions are a ruse, the miscreant is brought back to Bean's saloon, the money he gathered is confiscated and then he is splayed out on the joint's pool table, where the judge decides the culprit should have a real physical disability and threatens to cut off the man's legs with a rusty saw, but can't figure out where the cuts should take place ... so everyone takes a break to contemplate the matter over drinks, everyone but the former "cripple," who vacates the premise and is never seen in Langtry again.
*Discovering he'd been stiffed by an eastern tourist having beers while the train he is on takes on water at the town depot, Bean board's the train while it waits to leave town, puts a revolver in the face of the stranger, and demands the thirty-five cents he is owed ... which is handed over in the form of a dollar immediately (and just to show what a hale fellow he is, for once in his career as a judge, Bean gives the man back his correct change).
*Finding out in 1890 that financial speculator Jay Gould is touring the area, Bean stops the millionaire's train with a danger flag, then makes Gould and his daughter his guests in the Jersey Lilly for two hours of drinks and story telling about his life from the judge ... enough time to send the New York Stock Exchange into a brief panic when news is received that the missing Gould has perished in Texas train crash.
*Thinking to give himself and the citizens of Langtry some entertainment and some cash, in 1896, Bean organizes a heavyweight championship boxing match between 165-pound former English blacksmith, Bob Fitzsimmons, and Irish world champion, 180-pound Peter Maher for a payday of $15,000 (most of the money coming from swells and gamblers in El Paso). There is only one problem however, boxing is illegal in both nearby Mexico and in Texas. Undeterred though, Bean has the fight take place on a sandbar in the Rio Grande River, territory considered to be part of Mexico, but a part that Bean is sure the 200 Mexican soldiers assigned to the fight will not swim out to. Sandbar converted by forty men into a make-shift fight arena, before hundreds of boxing fans from all over America, a troop of 26 Texas Rangers (ready to arrest Bean if any fisticuffs take place in Texas, filmed for later showings around the nation (an early variant of pay-per-view events), on February 21st, in midnight blue trunks, Fitzsimmons, meets a black trunked Maher for the title, which the lighter man (Fitzsimmons still holds the record as the lightest heavyweight champion in boxing history) wins in the first round, knocking out Maher with a right hand at 1:35 of the match (both men wear five-ounce gloves). Not much of a fight, Bean is pleased anyway by besting the authorities of both Mexico and Texas, and because the cost of Langtry's food, whiskey, beer and "sporting" girls have all been marked up 100% while the region is hosting the event.
The Boxing Match
Bean In Front Of His Courthouse
Judge Bean
Bruno/Sarsaparilla
In 1885, the town of Langtry becomes part of Texas' newly formed Val Verde County, and a local well- digger wins the election for magistrate, beating Bean by a margin of 25 votes to 17. But Bean is reluctant to give up his gavel, and eventually the well-digger resigns and the judge is officially back in business until 1896. Feuding with the Torres family once more (the family owns most of the property in town and has tried to get rid of Bean for years, but Bean has taken advantage of a right-away law to build his bar and home on railroad property), rival saloon owner Jesus Torres is declared the winner of the 1896 election when it is determined that Bean has received more votes for judge than there are qualified voters, but as with the well-digger, Bean refuses to hand over his notary public seal or his law book and continues to judge cases. Eventually, the men come to a compromise and each man rules on cases on their side of Langtry's railroad tracks. Not content with the compromise, two years later when the men run against each other again, Bean keeps Torres voters from casting their ballots by chasing his opposition away from the town's polling place with a shotgun until the sheriff of Del Rio arrives on the scene and threatens to chain the judge to his pet bear if he keeps interfering in the election. Free to vote as it chooses, the town puts Torres in office for another term ... which Bean continues to ignore until he is legally elected once more in the magistrate contests of 1900 and 1902 (unbeknownst to those Langtry citizens not in need, the judge uses much of the fine money his court provides to help the poor of the region and insure that the local schoolhouse is stocked with firewood each winter).
Death finally comes calling for the judge on March 16, 1903. After a drinking binge in San Antonio (the judge is depressed that a modern electrical power station is being built for Langtry on the nearby Pecos River), Bean decides to accompany two Val Verde deputy sheriffs on a search of the region for a group of cattle rustlers, when during their hunt, the judge and his band find themselves suddenly assaulted by a sleet storm for which they are totally unprepared. Urging a return to Langtry which Bean denies, the men spend a freezing evening huddled together under their saddle blankets. In the morning, Bean is sick and delirious, babbling on and on about his boyhood in Kentucky. Arguments about how to proceed negated by Bean's fever, the judge is brought back to the Jersey Lilly and a doctor is wired for from the the town of Del Rio. Arriving on Monday in Langtry on the next westbound Southern Pacific train, Dr. Donald Taylor Atkinson (the 28-year-old will receive his medical degree from the Hospital College of Medicine in Lexington, Kentucky) will give Bean a shot of codeine and a dose of digitalis for his weakened heart, but it does little good and the judge passes away at 10:03 in the evening, slumped over his desk in the bar. He is 78-years-old.
Bean
Of course, no tale of Bean's life would be complete without mentioning the judge's decades long crush on the entertainer, Lillie Langtry (her real name is Emilie Charlotte Le Breton). For years, the judge will sing praises about the beauty and acting ability of his fantasy girl while claiming to be her acquaintance and stating that one day she will perform in Langtry. As noted earlier, backing up his infatuation with the actress, he names his bar after her, calls his home the Opera House anticipating Langtry will perform there someday, and loves telling how he named the town after her ... and woe be to anyone in the town that scoffs at his claims. He also claims to frequently correspond with the actress, and purports that in return, she sends him a brace of pistols that he cherishes for the rest of his life. The truth is that Bean doesn't know Langtry and that Langtry doesn't know him. When Bean expires in 1903, it is without ever having met the actress. However, Bean's claim that one day Langtry would visit the town named after her does come true only ten months after his death. Traveling from New Orleans to San Francisco on the Southern Pacific railroad line, Langtry decides to stop off in the town to meet her number one fan, but discovers instead that the judge has passed away. Passed away but not forgotten, Langtry visits the Jersey Lilly and the Opera House, watches as the bear she has inherited from the judge escapes into the desert, and listens to the townspeople tell Judge Roy Bean stories. Smiling as she reboards her west bound train, Langtry will one day write of her stop in Langtry in her 1925 autobiography, "The Days I Knew," stating, "It was a short visit, but an unforgettable one." Linked forever with her #1 fan, she too dies after an unsuccessful battle with pneumonia in Monte Carlo, Monaco on February 12, 1929. She is 75 years old at her passing.
Langtry
The Judge
And those are the Bean tales I'm sticking to ... March 16, 1903, and Judge Roy Bean begins his passage into a Wild West legend.
Waiting For Customers - Bronze
Sculpture By Erik Christianson
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