ing mention.

Joel Fowler was long considered a dangerous man. He was a ranch owner
and cow man, but he came into the settlements often, and nearly always
for the immediate purpose of getting drunk. In the latter condition he
was always bloodthirsty and quarrelsome, and none could tell what or
whom he might make the object of his attack. He was very insulting and
overbearing, very noisy and obnoxious, the sort of desperado who makes
unarmed men beg and compels "tenderfeet" to dance for his amusement. His
birth and earlier life seem hidden by his later career, when, at about
middle life, he lived in central New Mexico. He was accredited with
killing about twenty men, but there may have been the usual exaggeration
regarding this. His end came in 1884, at Socorro. He was arrested for
killing his own ranch foreman, Jack Cale, a man who had befriended him
and taken care of him in many a drunken orgy. He stabbed Cale as they
stood at the bar in a saloon, and while every one thought he was
unarmed. The law against carrying arms while in the settlements was then
just beginning to be enforced; and, although it was recognized as
necessary for men to go armed while journeying across those wild and
little settled plains, the danger of allowing six-shooters and whiskey
to operate at the same time was generally recognized as well. If a man
did not lay aside his guns on reaching a town, he was apt to be invited
to do so by the sheriff or town marshal, as Joel had already been asked
that evening.

Fowler's victim staggered to the door after he was stabbed and fell dead
at the street, the act being seen by many. The law was allowed to take
its course, and Fowler was tried and sentenced to be hanged. His lawyers
took an appeal on a technicality and sent the case to the supreme court,
where a long delay seemed inevitable. The jail was so bad that an
expensive guard had to be maintained. At length, some of the citizens
concluded that to hang Fowler was best for all concerned. They took him,
mounted, to a spot some distance up the railroad, and there hanged him.
Bill Howard, a negro section hand, was permitted by his section boss to
make a coffin and bury Fowler, a matter which the Committee had
neglected; and he says that he knows Fowler was buried there and left
there for several years, near the railway tracks. The usual story says
that Fowler was hanged to a telegraph pole in town. At any rate, he was
hanged, and a very wise and seemly