Gun Notching

The kind of bad man who reveled in his notches and gloated over his reputation was unusual in the Old West, although there were a few who did so. When Luke Short, a bad man bartender who shuttled back and forth from Kansas to Texas, was asked why he put notches on his gun, he replied, “When you come right down to it. I don’t know. It’s kind of a habit, I guess.” Henry Starr, the unparalleled Oklahoma bank robber, offered the most satisfactory and reasonable explanation why some gunmen cut notches in their weapons: “A skilled workman is proud of his tools. Watch a barber honing and fondling his favorite razor. It’s the best razor in seven states, if you believe him, and he’ll brag about how many thousand faces it has shaves, the wonderful steel in its blade and how it holds its edge. Or listen to a conductor or engineer bragging bout his watch that never varies a hundredth part of a second; or a carpenter talking about that saw he has had for nineteen years. We’ll the six-shooter is the working tool of the outlaw and the fellows who chase him, and a darned sight more important to him than a razor to the barber or the watch to the engineer, for his life hangs on it. A good six-shooter costs about forty dollars, and if you want to go in for ivory, stag horn, silver or gold mountings, you can go up a lot higher. A fellow gets into a hole and it downs the other fellow, he’s proud of it. He gives it a notch for remembrance. By the time there are six or eight notches on the stock he is a killer. He’s likely to be case-hardened by then and drop a man just to add another notch. Maybe he’s jealous of somebody that’s got fourteen notches on his shooting iron. It gets to be a kind of contest, like a fellow getting a lot of medals.” It was customary that the gun notches, literal, pretended or creditable, of the desperado were inherited by his killer who sought the reputation. That is, according to this custom, Pat Garrett, the New Mexico sheriff, would have been justified in cutting twenty-two notches in his gun – one for killing Billy the Kid and twenty-one for the men the Kid had killed – that is, if Pat Garrett had been the kind of braggadocious bad man sheriff some of them were. Wyatt Earp told his biographer Stuart Lake, “I never knew a man who amounted to anything to notch his guns with ‘credits’ as they were called for me he had killed. Outlaw, gunmen of the wild crew who killed for the sake of brag, followed this custom. I have worked with most of the noted peace officers – Hickok, Tilghman, Masterson, Bassett, and others of like caliber-have handled their weapons many times, but never knew one of them to carry a notched gun.” It does seem reasonable that the bad man, as a rule, would not care to have people estranged from and suspicious of themselves, especially their friends. They probably would be if they sported a notched gun. I think it’s a shame we can have some ‘notched’ system today. It’s hard to tell who the bad guys are many times.  There are so many vicious women who want out of a relationship who falsely accuse men of the most outrageous actions. There are a great many women who date men who have children from previous relationships that want them to make false allegations against their ex-wife’s family because they are jealous of his past relationship. It’s vicious and unforgivable and these women are oh so proud of themselves. Now if there was a way for them to ‘notch’ their foreheads or something they could be avoided all together. Until then, we just have to watch our own six.  Here’s a tip however; the bad guys now of days are generally someone our brothers have married.