I reviewed John Boessenecker’s Ride the Devil’s Herd the other day. The book is an impressive account of the deadly conflict between the Earp brothers, Virgil, Wyatt, and Morgan (note how I list Virgil first – he was the oldest of the three, and I’m an oldest too. We oldests have to stick together) and the rustler gang known as the Cowboys.

The book includes many interesting anecdotes, some of them surprising, some of them shocking, some disillusioning. One story amazed me. It’s one of the weirdest western yarns I’ve ever read, and I’m amazed I’d never heard of it before.

There was a member of the Cowboys known as “Russian Bill” Tattenbaum. He was an educated man of about 30, older than most of the other cowboys. He spoke French, Russian, Spanish, and English. He dressed expensively, with gold pieces on his buckskins, a silver hat band, and silver-plated, ivory-handled six-shooters. He had a reputation as a blowhard – he bragged about his crimes and depredations, but was considered all hat and very little cattle. One of his brags was that he was a European nobleman. Nobody believed that any more than his other tall tales.

He was finally arrested by a deputy and jailed in Shakespeare, New Mexico, in an adobe hotel, along with another Cowboy named Sandy King. According to newspaper accounts, they were “loud and demonstrative in their threats against the citizens, declaring that the people of the town would have an opportunity to dance to their music inside of twenty-four hours.”

At 2:00 a.m. the next morning, a group of local citizens, faces masked, overpowered the guard, took the pair to the bar room, and hanged them from a ceiling joist. Sandy King, according to witnesses, went to his death with dignity, but Russian Bill “begged for his life,” claiming he hadn’t committed any crimes at all, and was really a Russian nobleman who’d fled his native land because of a love affair. The vigilantes, neither convinced nor impressed, let Russian Bill swing.

A coroner’s jury the next day declared their deaths “suicide.”

Here’s the payoff:

…Five months later, in April 1882…, Sheriff Harvey Whitehill received a letter from the U.S. consul in St. Petersburg, Russia. The consulate had been contacted by a Russian countess whose son was in New Mexico and had not written to her since the previous May. The consul wrote… that the missing man’s name was “Waldemar Tethenborn” and provided his photograph. It was Russian Bill. Sheriff Whitehill replied to the consul and, to spare the mother’s feelings, reported that her son had committed suicide.