W. S. Norton-Killer of Jake Killian

The current issue of Wild West Magazine contains an article of mine about Jake Killian of Granby, Missouri, and his notorious family, and my Ozarks' Gunfights book contains a chapter about the same subject that is similar to the article. I don't have anything else to say about Jake and his family right now, but I would like to add a few words about William S. Norton, the man who ended up killing Jake in the spring of 1878 at Empire City, Kansas (now part of Galena), because Norton was something of a notorious character in his own right.
Norton and Killian were members of the same unit during the Civil War, and the two men got into a violent argument over a card game during the latter part of the war. They grappled over Norton's gun, but Norton managed to turn the gun toward Killian and shot him in the face, blinding him in one eye. Killian swore revenge, a mistake that eventually cost him his life.
After the war, Norton lived in Dallas County, Missouri, awhile but came to Joplin soon after lead was discovered and the town was established in the early 1870s. He served briefly as a constable or deputy constable and became embroiled in an 1874 dispute in Joplin when he was appointed city marshal after the sitting marshal was ousted by the city council. The two men feuded awhile before the incumbent went to court and regained his office. Norton hung around Joplin a few more years and was reported to have killed at least one or two men in cases that were ruled self defense.
Shortly after lead was discovered on Short Creek in southeast Kansas in 1877, Norton moved to the booming new lead town of Empire City. He killed Killian in March of 1878 when the latter came looking for him. Although this killing, like the previous ones, was ruled self defense (primarily because Killian had a notorious reputation and had stalked Norton), it was actually a clear case of murder. Killian was not even armed at the time Norton gunned him down.
Norton later ran unsuccessfully for sheriff of Cherokee County. Maybe the good folks of southeast Kansas wanted someone for their chief law enforcement officer who was a little more deliberate in the use of firearms than Bill Norton.

Jake Killian

A week or so ago I mentioned the fact that Granby produced a lot of desperate characters during its heyday as a mining town in the mid to late 1800s. One of them was Jake Killian. In fact, all the males in the whole Killian family were a bunch of hard cases. I have an article about the Killians that will be published in a future issue of Wild West Magazine. So, I don't want to steal my own thunder by going into a lot of detail here, but here's a brief version of their story. The Killian family moved from Arkansas to Granby during the mid 1850s. The father, Cy Killian, got beat to death with a whiffle-tree by a drinking buddy on the streets of Granby in the late 1850s. During the Civil War, an older brother of Jake named Mart was taken from a jail in Carthage and strung up to a tree near Spring River by bushwhackers who rode down from Barton County to avenge an outrage on a Lamar saloonkeeper's wife. Jake himself was shot and blinded in one eye during the war while wrestling a fellow soldier named Norton for a gun after getting into a dispute over a card game. After the war, Jake killed William Lake, owner of a traveling circus, when the circus came to Granby in 1869. In 1873, another of Jake's older brothers, Ben, got into a row at a similar traveling show in Granby, and an innocent bystander was killed during the ensuing gunplay. Two years later, Jake's younger brother, Thomas, and two other men killed one of the citizens who had served on the grand jury that indicted Ben Killian for murder. Then in 1878, Jake Killian was killed by William Norton, the same man who'd blinded him during the war, on the streets of Empire City, Kansas (now part of Galena), when he went there in search of revenge. So much for the Killian family.