[From Robert Welles Ritchie, The Hell-roarin' Forty-niners (1928), pp. 274-276]

 

How Reelfoot Williams Got His Name

 

            How Reelfoot Williams came by his name remains behind the veil of Time. Perhaps he hailed originally from the Reelfoot Swamp district of Tennessee; perhaps some peculiarity of his gait earned him the name. Contrary to Bret Harte's idealized portraits of the professional gambler of the gold

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diggin's the lily-fingered, the exquisitely ruffed Reelfoot was a curly mustang of the mountings who'd never been curried above the knees ; and he wanted everybody to be aware of that fact. Huge, gross, loud swearing, he came to Downieville in the year of '50 and started a monte-and-poker shack on Durgan's Flat. He soon made himself a special abomination when the suspicion grew that if anybody was lucky enough to get away from Reelfoot's tables with some winning pokes of gold dust his luck did not hold as far as his cabin. He was robbed at the point of a long navy revolver somewhere along the trail.

            One of the live and honest sports of the roaring camp was Chap Schaffer who, besides being an inveterate gambler at other men's games, was the local justice of the peace. Credit it to the memory of Judge Schaffer that the law sat him lightly; more than once he adjourned court when he heard the stakes were running high in Reelfoot's poker game and bought himself into the massacre.

            Perhaps Judge Schaffer felt some slight degree of embarrassment when, on a day in '51, he saw Reelfoot Williams standing, a prisoner, before the upended brandy barrel which was Chap's bar of justice. The charge against the big gambler was highway robbery; the complaining witness a German from Kanaka Creek who'd been held up on the trail after quitting Reelfoot's game a winner. Judge Schaffer gave the prisoner a square deal -- perhaps a little

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more than square. Reelfoot was acquitted. But the temper of Downieville was riled, and the big card riffler was advised that a change of scene would be his best -- practically his only -- life insurance.

            Day after the acquittal Judge Schaffer had private business calling him over the trail to Slug Creek diggings. Midway between the two camps a big masked bully stepped out of the brush and gave Judge Schaffer the come-across sign with an interesting gesture of his revolver. The robber peered once under the floppy black hat of his victim, then gave a grim laugh.

            "I pass, Judge!" said Reelfoot. "After what you done for me yesterday I can't take a cent off'n you even if you had it; which I misdoubt, you bein' Downieville's worst poker player."

            Chap Schaffer, recognizing his benefactor, was thanking him cordially when the highwayman interrupted.

            "Do me a favor, Judge, and hit the trail -- hard! There's another feller coming up round the bend and I gotta tap him for a stake to git outa the country on."

            The worthy justice of the peace hit the trail and never looked back to have his judicial eye shocked by a heinous crime against property. Reelfoot tapped the second trail farer for seven hundred dollars and got out of the country. He left behind him at least one admirer, Judge Chap Schaffer.

            But Reelfoot did not mend his ways. Instead, he

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compounded his native instinct for crime by tying in with one Rattlesnake Dick and three other journeymen robbers, the five of them making a tidy little band of cutthroats. They operated over all the trails from Quincy, in Plumas County, as far south as Nevada City and with occasional forays away down to the Mokelumne and Stanislaus diggin's. And that incident of the holdup of Judge Schaffer was Reelfoot's single shining deed of chivalry. When three of the gang were blotted out in a battle with a sheriff's posse near Forbestown, Yuba County, and after Rattlesnake Dick had been stabbed to death in a knife duel over a woman, Reelfoot went into temporary retirement as a gambler at Sacramento.

            But with the Virginia City boom, the call to the open road was too compelling. Our highwayman put himself at the head of a gang operating about the new silver fields of Nevada and flourished for a year. A rival finally poked a gun through a saloon window in Virginia and transferred the scene of Reelfoot's activities to the slag piles of hell.