George Hudson Again

I recently had an article in Wild West about George Hudson, the notorious villain from Granby, Missouri. I also think I may have posted an entry about Hudson on this blog a year or more ago, but I'd like to add a brief update.
As I mention in the article, one of the several murders that Hudson committed during his infamous "career" was the cold-blooded killing in 1886 of Dr. L. G. Houard, a Joplin dentist. Hudson was finally arrested for the murder in 1891, and his case came to trial the following year at Rolla, Missouri, on a change of venue from Jasper County. At the trial, evidence was a presented by the prosecution that the motive for the murder was that Houard, a known womanizer, had been having an affair with the wife of wealthy Granby mine owner Peter Blow and that Blow had hired Hudson to do the job. Despite this and considerable other evidence against Hudson, he was acquitted.
Recently I read a piece online about Peter Blow that appeared in a Tennessee newspaper a year and a half ago. (Blow spent much of his later life in Tennessee.) In discussing the Hudson murder case, the author of the newspaper piece suggests that the trial amounted to an attempt to slander Blow's good name and that Hudson was indeed innocent. He says that although a few observers made the accusation that the outcome of the trial was a travesty of justice, few people believed this assertion.
To the contrary, Hudson was widely considered to be guilty by the people who knew him and his notorious record best--the citizens of the area where he lived. In southwest Missouri, most people considered the result of the trial at Rolla to be a "bought verdict." Hudson had used intimidation, bribery, and any other means at his disposal to escape prosecution in other cases, and the overwhelming opinion around Joplin and Granby was that he had done so again in the Houard case.
I can't say with any certainty that Peter Blow hired Hudson to kill Houard, as the prosecution claimed, but I do feel quite sure that Hudson did, in fact, commit the murder.

Bud Blunt

The last but not the least of the Granby (Missouri) desperadoes was Allen "Bud" Blunt (also spelled "Blount"). Bud was born around 1850 at Poplar Bluff (Mo.) in Butler County and moved with his family, including three brothers and two sisters, to Granby in the early 1860s. Although he was involved in a scrape in late 1873 when his pal John Cole was shot and killed on the streets of Granby (see my previous post on Hobbs Kerry), Bud, like a lot of outlaws, seemingly started off on the right side of the law, running for city marshal of Granby in 1874 as the candidate of the Workingman's Party. In 1877, though, he and a gang that included George Hudson and Bud's older brother, John, galloped into the nearby town of Webb City and shot up the place, wounding a couple of innocent bystanders, because a friend of theirs had been incarcerated there for public drunkenness. Shortly after this incident, Hudson and the Blunts moved to Colorado, where Hudson and Bud Blunt assaulted and robbed one man and, according to Blunt's own later testimony, killed another near Leadville. Around 1880, the Blunts ambled into Arizona Territory, where Bud got beat up by a man named McDonald at the mining camp of Tip Top and killed the man in retaliation. He was sentenced to the territorial prison for the crime, but Wyatt Earp, who knew the Blunt boys, intervened on Bud's behalf and helped get him released after a couple of years. Bud returned to his home territory after his release but couldn't stay out of trouble. He was arrested for stealing horses (one report says mules) and sentenced to the Kansas Penitentiary. Released around 1890, he boarded an eastbound train in Granby later that year and, near Ritchey, killed a brakeman who was trying to remove him to the smoking car because of his drunken behavior. Acting quickly, the conductor shoved the killer off the train, and Blunt was found later the same day in a ditch near where he was kicked off, having drunk himself into a stupor. He was arrested, convicted of first degree murder, and sentenced to hang. The sentence was later commuted to life in prison, and Blunt was pardoned around 1900.
As I've chronicled during the past couple of weeks, Granby had at least five desperate characters who not only were associated with the town during the post-Civil War era but who lived there during most of their youth and early manhood, and this number does not include brothers and other sidekicks of the notorious quintet. If another town of comparable size produced as many infamous characters during America's Wild West era as Granby, I don't know what that town would be.

Bob Layton

Yet another of the nest of villains inhabiting Granby, Missouri, during the latter half of the nineteenth century was Bob Layton. Bob and his family, consisting of his parents and several sisters, came to Granby from Tennessee near the start of the Civil War when he was a young boy five or six years old. Layton first etched his name in the annals of outlawry on the evening of June 16, 1877, at the fledgling mining town of Galena just across the Kansas state line. Nursing an old grudge, he and three other Granby men burst into Dykeman's Restaurant and opened fire on William St. Clair and Harry Campbell while the latter were seated at a table taking dinner. The ambush mortally wounded St. Clair and left Campbell with a flesh wound. A hastily formed posse pursued the attackers and briefly exchanged shots with them, but Layton and his cohorts made a clean escape. St. Clair was known as "Tiger Bill" because of his reputation in the area as a rough character, but it's not known what supposed wrong the Granby boys were avenging. Around this same time, Layton became a part-time sidekick of the notorious George Hudson, but it's also not known with any certainty whether Hudson came along on the Galena escapade.
What is known is that Layton and Hudson, along with Hudson's brother Jack, were passing through Batesville, Arkansas, on the evening of November 7, 1879, and tarried in town long enough to get into a barroom brawl. They conked one man over the head with a pistol and fired a shot at another one. A posse followed them to their camp outside town and captured George Hudson after an exchange of lead, but the other two men escaped. Layton came back to Batesville the next night to try to break George Hudson out of jail and was shot and killed after he was recognized and ordered to halt but went for his gun instead. Thus was cut short the promising criminal career of Robert Layton.

George Hudson

I've discussed a couple of notorious characters of late nineteenth century Granby, Missouri, in my previous two posts, but the king of the Granby outlaws was, without a doubt, George Hudson. He was rumored to have already killed a man when he was a young teenager in Mississippi before coming to Granby with his parents and siblings in the late 1860s. Then, over the next twenty years, he killed five more men in four known incidents, including a murder for hire on the streets of nearby Joplin, and was rumored to have killed others. Hudson's felonious record was so extensive that it is hard to imagine how he was allowed to go free for so long, but he and his family had such a stranglehold on the lawless town of Granby that few dared to oppose them. Hudson was finally gunned down in his Granby saloon in 1892 by a deputy who was trying to arrest him for a crime he had committed years earlier during a brief sojourn in Colorado.
For a more detailed account of Hudson's murderous shenanigans, look for my article in an upcoming issue of Wild West Magazine on the "autocrat" who sat on the "criminal throne" at Granby.