The Real Slade

A historical figure from the American Wild West made a strong and distasteful impression on George Orwell; so much so that he wrote about the man on two occasions, almost a year apart, yet using very similar language. Firstly, in ‘Mark Twain: The Licensed Jester’ (November 1943):

In Roughing It there is an interesting account of a bandit named Slade who, among countless other outrages, had committed 28 murders. It is perfectly clear that Mark Twain admires this disgusting scoundrel. Slade was successful; therefore he was admirable.

Then, in ‘Raffles and Miss Blandish’ (August 1944):

In America, both in life and fiction, the tendency to tolerate crime, even to admire the criminal so long as he is successful, is very much more marked. It is, indeed, ultimately this attitude that has made it possible for crime to flourish upon so huge a scale. Books have been written about Al Capone that are hardly different in tone from the books written about Henry Ford, Stalin, Lord Northcliffe and all the rest of the “log cabin to White House” brigade. And switching back eighty years, one finds Mark Twain adopting much the same attitude towards the disgusting bandit Slade, hero of twenty-eight murders, and towards the Western desperadoes generally. They were successful, they “made good,” therefore he admired them.

Everything that Orwell knew about Slade was moderated through his reading of Mark Twain, who had met Slade, liked him but still called him ‘a Rocky Mountain desperado’. Here I look at the real Joseph Alfred ‘Jack’ Slade, to whom Twain dedicated two chapters of Roughing It. My main source is Dan Rottenberg’s book The Death of a Gunfighter.

Slade and Twain, from Roughing It

Family Background. Joseph Alfred Slade was born in Carlyle, Illinois, on 22 January 1831. His father, who had moved from Virginia to Illinois, became a wealthy businessman and Congressman but died when Slade was three. Four years later, in February 1838, his thirty- eight year old mother married Elias Smith Dennis, thirteen years her junior, who became a businessman and politician, and was a Brigadier General in the Union Army in the American Civil War.

The Mexican War. In 1845 the newly elected Democrat President James Knox Polk goaded Mexico into war with the USA. In 1847 Joseph Alfred Slade, sixteen, and his older brother Charles Richard Slade joined an Illinois Volunteer Regiment. It garrisoned Santa Fe but suffered heavy losses from sickness due to poor sanitation and heavy drinking, particularly of tequila. The dead included Slade’s brother, Quartermaster Sergeant Charles Richard Slade aged twenty five, who left a widow and three children.

The USA won the Mexican War and annexed most of the present day south-west USA. American veterans were granted land claims. It took several months and his step father’s political influence before Joseph Alfred Slade got the relevant official documentation but he never used his to acquire land and probably sold it to speculators as did most veterans.

The Wagon Master The next few years in Slade’s life are poorly documented. In 1849 he joined the California Gold Rush. He returned disillusioned but went west again and became a teamster and then a wagon master in charge of wagon trains.

California became a state in 1850. Travel between it and the eastern USA meant an ox wagon-train journey to or from Missouri, which was accessible from the east by steamboats and railways. The wagon trains travelled long distances through dangerous country inhabited by hostile Indians. A wagon master needed a clear head, tact and to be handy with a gun. Slade was handy with a gun. When sober he had the other qualities.

Stagecoaches. In 1857 a military road was built between California and Missouri. It made travel by horse drawn stage coaches possible on this route and Slade became a stagecoach driver. Stagecoaches travelled much faster than ox wagons and carried passengers and mail. They still needed way stations which needed divisional road agents to supervise them.

Between 1858 and 1862 Slade was in succession a stage coach divisional superintendent for Hockaday & Co (John M. Hockaday); Jones, Russell & Co; and Central Overland, California and Pike’s Peak Express Co., usually called Central Overland, which ran the legendary but unprofitable Pony Express. It was meant to cut mail delivery times to California to ten days; and lasted eighteen months before the completion of telegraph lines to California made it obsolete.

Joseph Alfred Slade, nicknamed ‘Jack’ Slade, maintained order for the companies he worked for. Legends passed on by many writers including Mark Twain (who calls him simply ‘Slade’) credited him with twenty eight killings. In reality only two killings by him are documented, with a third possible one. He have may created the exaggerated (twenty-eight) claims about himself to gain more respect. The dead were:

Andrew Ferrin. On 20 May 1859 some teamsters broke into company liquor stores and got drunk. Slade tackled them and shot and killed Andrew Ferrin who was buried in an unmarked grave near the Hams Fork River next to the Overland Trail route, in what became Lincoln County, Wyoming. Andrew Ferrin’s age is unknown.

Jules Beni a mixed heritage French Canadian/Indian man owned and ran a trading post, saloon, restaurant, hotel and store at the town of Julesberg, named after him in Sedgwick County, Colorado. The stagecoaches brought more traffic and he added a warehouse, a blacksmith’s shop, a stable and a billiards’ hall. With a hundred inhabitants it was the largest town for more than two hundred miles. In 1859 Beni was appointed divisional superintendent for the Central Overland route’s two hundred miles stretch around Julesberg. He began stealing company horses and hay and sold them back to the company or used them on his own ranch. What worried the company was not the relatively small monetary loss but the disruption to traffic it caused. He was fired and replaced by Slade.

Slade and one of his men: an illustration from Roughing It

Beni ambushed and badly wounded Slade with a shotgun. Slade recovered and warned Beni to leave his territory but in August 1861 Beni returned and was shot dead, either by Slade or by one of his men.

A third killing? An article about Slade in the 11 November 1933 Alpine Avalanche (Alpine is a small West Texas mountain town) alleges he killed a mixed heritage white/Indian man. Even this alleged third victim’s name was unrecorded. The article commented that given the racial attitudes in Slade’s time this was unremarkable.

The end. As Mark Twain related, Slade when sober was charming and civilized. When drunk, which was often, he was a hot tempered, violent and dangerous bully. In November 1862 his employers fired him. He moved to Virginia City, a Montana gold rush town. He and his wife tried ranching and freighting but he resumed his drunken ways. On 10 March 1864 local vigilantes lynched him. It may well have been Twain’s response to Slade’s death that so shocked Orwell. Twain wrote:

… Slade showed that he was a man of peerless bravery. No coward would dare that. Many a notorious coward, many a chicken-livered poltroon, coarse, brutal, degraded, has made his dying speech without a quaver in his voice and been swung into eternity with what looked liked the calmest fortitude, and so we are justified in believing, from the low intellect of such a creature, that it was not moral courage that enabled him to do it. Then, if moral courage is not the requisite quality, what could it have been that this stout-hearted Slade lacked?—this bloody, desperate, kindly-mannered, urbane gentleman, who never hesitated to warn his most ruffianly enemies that he would kill them whenever or wherever he came across them next! I think it is a conundrum worth investigating.

My Conclusion. Killer Slade was a lawman and drunk, but not a bandit. Some American frontiersmen were both, such as Sheriff Henry Plummer of Bannack, Montana, who led a gang of horse thieves and was lynched in 1864. The lawman/gangster has been known in other cultures, as with Jonathan Wild in Georgian Britain, or Eugene Francois Vidocq the criminal who founded the Sûreté, France’s national detective force.

Fanny Trollope in the tenth chapter of her 1832 book Domestic Manners of the Americans said that ‘All the freedom enjoyed in America, beyond what is enjoyed in England, is enjoyed solely by the disorderly at the expense of the orderly’. As late as 1883 Mark Twain said that this was ‘true yet’. Whatever else the Americans tolerated they made short work of Slade.

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References

Rottenberg, Dan (2008). Death of a Gunfighter: The Quest for Jack Slade, the West’s Most Elusive Legend. (Yardley, PA: Westholme Publishing)