Wild Shenanigans at the Vaudeville Theatre

Last week I mentioned the rowdy activities at Johnson’s Vaudeville Variety Theatre in early-day Joplin, but sometimes things crossed the line from rowdy to violent.  

In 1877, Frank Carney, a brother of Cora Johnson, arrived in Joplin to visit his sister and began helping out in the Vaudeville saloon. On October 17, George O’Bannon stumbled into the bar drunk and knocked over a stove, scattering fire and ashes on the floor. Carney tried to get the man to clean up the mess, and they got into a violent argument. When O’Bannon cursed Carney, Carney knocked him down and began beating him, but O’Bannon pulled a knife and stabbed his assailant. O’Bannon was quickly arrested and lodged in jail, while Carney, although seriously wounded, soon revived.

In the wee hours of December 18, 1879, Cora announced that it was time to close the saloon and started to lock up. Two young hellions named Billy Beck and Charles Marshall told her not to be so fast because they wanted something more to drink. Willing to stay open a while longer, Cora sat back down, but when Beck asked whether his credit was good, she told him no. Beck replied with profane language, and bartender Johnny Manning intervened, herding Beck out of the building. While Cora went behind the bar to get the day’s receipts from the money till, Marshall followed Beck and Manning outside and fired a shot at the bartender. Manning ducked back into the saloon, and the two hellions rushed in behind him. Marshall fired a shot that struck a mirror near Cora’s head, shattering the glass into pieces, and Cora dashed into an adjoining room. The two hell-raisers fled, as A. S. Johnson gave chase with a double-barrel shotgun. Both young men were later arrested for felonious assault.

One of Johnson’s employees, gambler Jake Pecora, started running a lunch counter at the Vaudeville saloon in partnership with Al Searle. On Sunday, June 27, 1880, the two partners got into a disagreement and ended up, according to the Joplin Daily Herald, indulging in “a first class row.” Pecora drew a pistol, but Searle kicked it out of his hand, causing it to go off, and the ball struck Searle in the foot. Pecora was arrested and charged with felonious assault. Among the witnesses for the state in the case were Thomas Carney, who was another brother of Cora Johnson, and a soiled dove named Allie Rogers. The charges against Pecora were eventually dropped.

On June 6, 1881, after A. S. Johnson had sold the saloon to Pecora, Tom Carney started to take some silverware from the saloon, claiming it belonged to his sister and her husband. Pecora said he owned the silverware because it came with the property, and the two men got into a violent argument. Pecora had Carney put out of the saloon, and Carney went next door to his sister’s house to get a pistol. Back at the saloon, he opened fire on Pecora, who returned fire. Approximately eight shots were fired in all, and Charles Thompson, a theater performer, was hit and mortally wounded. Carney was charged with murder, but he, too, died from his wounds before the case came to trial.
And those were some of the wild goings-on at Johnson's Vaudeville Variety Theatre in early-day Joplin. This story is condensed from a chapter in my Wicked Joplin book.       

A. S. and Cora Johnson and the Vaudeville Variety Theatre

In 1870s Joplin, the Vaudeville Variety Theatre was the place to be for rowdy miners looking for ribald entertainment.

A. S. Johnson arrived in Joplin about 1872 and opened a vaudeville show in a building on Broadway, and he and his wife, Cora, also ran an adjoining saloon. The Vaudeville building had rooms to house the itinerant players, and Cora usually kept a stable of prostitutes on the premises as well. Broadway was the link between Main Street in West Joplin and Main Street in East Joplin, and at this time there was no bridge over Joplin Creek so that Broadway actually went down into the valley, which is where Johnson's theater was located.

Dolph Shaner's Story of Joplin, published in 1948, paints a colorful picture of Johnson's Variety Show:

     This amusement hall provided a cheap vaudeville show of song and dance numbers.         Occasionally a burlesque troupe from St. Louis acted before the brilliant kerosene floodlights,   replaced later with more brilliant gas jets; burnt cork artists, Indian club swingers, slack rope   walkers, banjo pickers and German bands entertained. It was a bad place for decent people, because   many women who frequented the vaudeville reddened their cheeks with rouge and penciled their     eye brows. They were even seen there in red petticoats or red scarfs.... As if this were not enough,   the "hussies" on the stage, in the amusement emporium, were bold enough to appear in knee length   skirts and whirled about showing a glimpse of lace on white muslin undergarments.

During the late 1870s and into the early 1880s, Cora was occasionally indicted in Jasper County for keeping a bawdy house. Like most of the madams of early-day Joplin, she was, as a rule, merely slapped with a minor fine and released to resume her avocation. She or her husband was also occasionally cited for selling liquor without a license or selling liquor on Sunday. Like most activities in early-day Joplin, the goings-on at the Vaudeville Theatre were scarcely deterred by the Sabbath. The liquor cases, too, usually resulted only in small fines.

The Vaudeville Theatre drew well throughout most of its stay in Joplin, even though it was open nearly every night of the week and even when it faced competition from other venues, like the more sophisticated Opera House near 2nd and Main. “No matter what the number of counter attractions they may offer to…the amusement seeker,” remarked a Joplin Daily Herald reporter in January 1878, “Vaudeville claims her full share.”

Johnson made periodic trips to large cities to secure new talent for his vaudeville show. In early February 1878, for instance, he went to Kansas City and brought back seriocomic vocalist Jennie Southern. Later in the year, “the great Negro delineator” Billy Diamond, sometimes called “the black Diamond of America,” played to full houses on Joplin’s Broadway.

On the night of November 17, 1879, the brass band that Johnson employed in conjunction with his vaudeville stirred up Joplin when it marched down Main Street and got into a noisy competition with another band that was playing at the Opera House at the time. “It was a sight and sound never to be forgotten,” said a Daily Herald reporter the next day.

The Johnsons sold their theater in the spring of 1881 and then sold their adjoining property in the summer of 1881 to Joplin’s boss beer man, Charles Schifferdecker. They hung around long enough for Cora to be cited in June of 1882 for running a house of ill fame but apparently took their leave soon afterward.

This blog entry is condensed from a chapter in my book Wicked Joplin.

Macomb Train Robbery

On the evening of January 3, 1899, a westbound train was held up by about half a dozen men at Macomb, Missouri, a station along the Kansas City, Fort Scott and Memphis Railroad, a few miles east of Mansfield in Wright County. Later evidence showed that the robbers had arranged for a local man, Oscar Ray, to purchase a passenger ticket from Norwood to Macomb as a way of insuring that the train would stop at Macomb, although Ray apparently was otherwise unaware of the outlaws' plans.
When the train stopped at Macomb, Ray got off and started directly toward his home three miles into the country, while the robbers, all of them masked except one, appeared on the scene and compelled the engineer and fireman to leave the engine and go back and uncouple the passenger cars from the front part of the train. The robbers then commandeered the engine, the mail car, and the combination express/baggage car, and one of them got in the engine and drove the three cars away from the station a distance of one fourth to one half mile. Here the robbers broke into the express/baggage car, blew open the safe, and robbed it of its contents, including about $900 and several watches. The holdup men then fired a few warning shots before hurrying to their horses, which they had left about a half mile south of the track, to make their getaway.
A local farmer named Lewis Nigh and two men named Jennings and Sheppard, who were not from the area, were arrested on suspicion at Nigh's home on January 7. Nigh's son-in-law Elmer Byrum was arrested the next day, and he soon turned state's evidence, implicating another local farmer, Jake Fagley, and a man named Jack Kennedy, who had first been introduced to Byrum under the alias of Wright. Kennedy was arrested in Kansas City on January 10, and Fagley was arrested about the same time or shortly afterward in Laclede County, 65 miles from Macomb.
All six men were charged with train robbery, but young Byrum cut a deal with the prosecution and the charges against him were dropped (or at least he didn't spend any time in prison). He testified against the other defendants, naming Kennedy as the ringleader of the gang and the one who had talked the local farmers into going along with the scheme. Kennedy was from the Kansas City area and had spent some time there in the city jail, where Jennings had been one of his fellow inmates. Kennedy had at one time been a railroad engineer, and he was the man who had driven the engine away from the station at Macomb. Sheppard was also from the KC area, but he was just a 17-year-old lad.
All five defendants were convicted of train robbery and received varying sentences. Although Kennedy was supposedly the leader of the gang, Jennings received the longest sentence, twenty years in the state pen. Kennedy received a seventeen-year sentence. Both Nigh and Fagley were given twelve years, while Sheppard, probably in consideration of his youth, was sentenced to only ten years in prison.
Nigh died in prison just a year or so after being sent up, and the other four were all released early, either under the state's three-fourths rule or by having their sentences commuted by the governor.
Discharged in 1912, Kennedy went on to resume his career in train robbery. Using a similar M.O. as the Macomb robbers had used, Kennedy and a sidekick held up a train near the small community of Seventy-Six in eastern Missouri in early November 1922 as it was bound from St. Louis to Memphis. After uncoupling the mail and express cars from the passenger cars, the outlaw pair drove the locomotive and two cars down the track a ways before stopping and robbing the mail car. They then uncoupled the engine from the other two cars and drove it south, jumping from the still-running locomotive near Wittenburg, where their getaway automobile was hidden in some brush.
Unbeknownst to the bandits, postal detectives were onto their scheme and were waiting for them near the vehicle. When the two outlaws made a move for their guns, the officers opened fire, killing both desperadoes.

Killing of Sheriff Shenneman and Lynching of Charles Cobb

I know that Cowley County, Kansas, is a quite a ways from the the Missouri and Ozarks regions I normally write about, but it was the scene of one of the incidents in my recent book Murder and Mayhem in Southeast Kansas. So, I'm going to write about it, since I don't have anything else in mind that I particularly want to write about at this time.

After killing a lawman in northern Kansas in early January 1883, nineteen-year-old Charley Cobb fled the area and headed south. He was tentatively located later the same month working on a farm in northwest Cowley County. Sheriff Albert T. Shenneman went out from Winfield to the farm on January 23 to positively identify the suspect and make his arrest if he proved to be the fugitive.

Posing as a doctor, Shenneman gained admittance to the house and identified Cobb. He then sprang on him in an attempt to disarm him, but Cobb shot the sheriff during the struggle. The seriously wounded Shenneman and the farmer finally managed to get Cobb’s pistol away, and a schoolmaster from a nearby school also hurried to the aid of the other two men. Cobb was placed under arrest and sent to the county jail at Winfield, while the sheriff lingered in pain at the farmhouse. He explained to a reporter that he hadn’t pulled his revolver on Cobb because he hated to wield a weapon against a mere boy, but Cobb had proved stronger and wirier than Shenneman had given him credit for.

The deputies escorting Cobb to jail learned as they approached Winfield that a mob was waiting to take their prisoner from them, and they hid him out until the mob dispersed and then delivered him to the jail in the wee hours of January 24. Interviewed in jail later that morning, the diminutive Cobb denied his identity, and he said he would not have shot the sheriff if Shenneman had identified himself as a law officer and demanded his surrender instead of jumping him as if to rob him. Later that day, the prisoner was taken to Sedgwick County Jail in Wichita for safekeeping.

Shenneman died on the night of January 25. The next day, a man from the suspect’s old neighborhood in northern Kansas arrived in Wichita and positively identified him as Charley Cobb, the same man who’d killed the lawman northeast of Topeka. Cobb claimed the witness was simply mistaken, because he had never seen the man before in his life.

On Saturday morning, January 27, Shenneman’s chief deputy and two sheriffs from surrounding counties started with Cobb in a carriage from Wichita to Winfield. Nearing Winfield, the officers again learned a mob was waiting to take Cobb from them, and the two sheriffs took him away from the town while the deputy went into Winfield and was confronted by the mob demanding to know the whereabouts of the prisoner. During the wee hours of January 26, one of the sheriffs escorted Cobb back to Wichita for safekeeping.

On Wednesday, January 31, the deputy brought Cobb back from Wichita to Winfield yet again, and the prisoner was successfully lodged in the Cowley County Jail early that evening. But he didn’t stay long.

About 2:30 a.m. on February 1, an organized squad of thirteen men wearing black masks descended on the jail and forced the acting sheriff to hand over the keys to the jail under a threat of having his head blown off. Three or four of the “black maskers,” as the local newspaper called them, went into the jail and came out herding the prisoner. He was taken to the west edge of Winfield to a railroad bridge over the Walnut River. A rope was looped over his neck and the other end tied to a beam of the bridge. The vigilantes positioned Cobb on the bridge and dropped him between the railings to his death. As soon as the mob withdrew into the night, a crowd of curious onlookers surged up to the bridge to gawk at the suspended man.

The body was cut down later on the morning of February 1, and a coroner’s jury held that day concluded that Cobb had come to his death at the hands of unknown parties.