If ever a man talked himself into a hangman's noose, it was Bill Longley. As with so many other notorious Texans in the mid-1870s, Longley had an ego as large as a room, and his boastful nature ultimately sealed his doom when he was finally held accountable for his crimes. And this raises a question as to whether or not Longley deserves to be discussed in the same breath with better-known shootists like Wild Bill Hickok, John Wesley Hardin or Ben Thompson. Rather than wearing the mantle of legendary gunfighter, perhaps he was nothing but a cold-blooded murderer.

Born in Austin County, on October 6, 1851, William Preston Longley was the sixth of 10 children produced by Texas Revolution veteran Campbell Longley and his wife, Sarah. He was raised on a farm near the small community of Evergreen, in what became Lee County, and received an average education for a boy at that time. When fully grown, he was a lanky 6-footer, with curly black hair, an angular face with high cheek bones and, most striking, small, piercing black eyes through which the menacing forces within Longley made themselves most evident.

After the Civil War, the Reconstruction Act of 1867 introduced the military occupation of Southern states, including Texas, and resulted in the displacement of elected officials at all levels by incompetent hacks to whom political favors were owed. The world as young Bill Longley and other Texans knew it was turned upside down. Fervent Unionists were now in control, and it was galling to the unprepared Texas communities to witness equally unprepared newly freed slaves awkwardly exercising their civil liberties, with both the Army and Freedman's Bureau in place to make sure that the ex-slaves were not abused.

Considerable resentment grew as Texans began to accommodate to this new state of affairs. But many remained unreconstructed, especially younger men such as John Wesley Hardin and Bill Longley. Although too young to have fought in the war, they nevertheless felt compelled to keep the ex-slaves in what they perceived as their place. Longley dropped out of school and stopped attending to his chores on the family farm. He assumed the lifestyle of a hellion and, with some other youths in the area, preyed on black men when the opportunity arose. Stories survive of Longley and others disrupting traveling circuses by injudicious use of their pistols, as well as forcing confrontations with black men, usually with robbery in mind. The general community tended to overlook Longley's rebellious nature, bad habits and predilection for trouble, at least until he finally killed someone.

In mid-December 1868, three former slaves -- Green and Pryor Evans, brothers, and another known as Ned -- left Bell County on horseback to travel south and visit friends and relatives in Austin County for Christmas. They passed through the Evergreen area, where Longley and several companions spotted them, especially eyeing the splendid horse ridden by Green Evans. The white men stopped the trio and proposed a swap for the horse, but the former slaves declined. A few minutes later, Longley and his group got the drop on the three travelers and forced them to ride into a remote creek bottom.

Fearing the worst, Green Evans spurred his mount and raced to escape. A volley of pistol balls followed him, one tunneling through his head and killing him. In the confusion, the other black men fled. Longley and his companions rifled the dead man's pockets and then rode off.

When the former slave owner, Alfred Evans, of Salado in Bell County, rode to Evergreen to investigate, he ran into a wall of silence. Longley was generally credited with killing Green Evans, though he later claimed that all of them shot at the fleeing youth. No formal charges were ever brought in the matter, indicative of the community's toleration of such lawlessness so long as the victims were ex-slaves. However, the danger of arrest by the military was sufficient to convince the 17-year-old Longley that he should leave the area. At this point, the story of Longley's life becomes one of tangled fact and fiction, the product of tall tales spun by him after he was arrested years later. The following account hews to the facts as documented, and the reader will note significant gaps in which there is no account of his activities. According to Longley, he left his familiar stomping grounds and by the spring of 1869 found himself in northeastern Texas, not far from Texarkana. He claimed that he was grabbed by a mob that believed he was part of the gang of cutthroat Cullen Montgomery Baker, and that they hanged him on the spot, along with a man named Johnson. According to Longley, the vigilantes left right away, and Johnson's brother shot the rope holding him and he dropped to the ground, barely alive. He then supposedly became one of Baker's chief lieutenants. Of course, there are problems with this story -- Baker was killed in January 1869, and there is no record that Longley was ever a part of that gang. However, one of the lasting legends about Longley was born.

In reality, Longley continued to rampage in south-central Texas, now accompanied by his older brother-in-law, John Wilson. They killed a freedman named Paul Brice in Bastrop County, then took his horses and reportedly killed a black woman near Evergreen. In March 1870, a $1,000 reward was offered for both of them by military authorities, describing them as murderers and horse thieves, although accounts of many of their crimes have not survived. Longley later claimed that Wilson was killed and buried in Brazos County in the spring of 1870, even though there is some evidence that he was killed in Falls County in 1874. All of this was enough to force Longley out of Texas, and he headed north, perhaps on a cattle drive. In May 1870, he joined a gold-hunting expedition leaving Cheyenne, in Wyoming Territory, and headed into the Black Hills of Dakota Territory. However, a treaty with the Sioux prohibited mining activities in the mountains, and a cavalry unit intercepted the gold-hunting party, which promptly disbanded. Longley found himself stranded and penniless, so on June 22, 1870, he enlisted for five years as a trooper in Company B of the 2nd Cavalry Regiment, stationed at Camp Stambaugh in the mountains near the mining towns of South Pass and Atlantic City on the Continental Divide.

The primary duty for troops at this new post was scouting for the continuing Indian threat, but as with any Army post, there was a structured lifestyle. Longley quickly found military life not to his liking. He deserted two weeks later, but was caught, returned and court-martialed for desertion. Pleading guilty, he was sentenced to two years at hard labor. Wearing a 24-pound ball and chain, he began serving his sentence in the newly built stockade at Camp Stambaugh. However, four months later, in December, when a harsh winter overtook the post with 20-foot snowdrifts, his company commander took pity on the young man, and Longley was released to resume his military duties. Private Longley was recognized as a skilled marksman, so he became a regular member of hunting parties that combed the mountains for provisions for the post. One sergeant, though, recalled Longley as "an idle boaster, a notorious liar and a man of low instinct and habits, but tolerated on account of his good nature, gift of gab, and excellent marksmanship." Longley later denied he was ever in the U.S. Army, falsely claiming that he had been a teamster and had killed an officer with whom he shared a kickback scheme.

The young soldier tolerated Army life in the mountains of Wyoming for only another 18 months, then deserted again in June 1872, this time for good. Where he went or what he did is not known, but he turned up in Texas in February 1873, when it was reported that he and others had murdered a black man named Price in Brown County. In July of that year, he was in Bell County, where his parents had moved and were now farming along the Lampasas River. Someone spotted him carrying a pistol, which was illegal, and he was later indicted for that, although not arrested.

Two weeks later he was arrested in Kerr County when he was found with remnants of Frank Eastwood's gang of horse thieves. Vigilantes, grown tired of the depredations of Eastwood and his men, had about decimated the gang, and Longley had the bad luck of being with some of the gunfighters fleeing the mob. Identified as wanted for murder, Longley was taken to Austin by Mason County Sheriff J.J. Finney, who hoped to claim any reward. However, when the reward was not forthcoming from the state of Texas because it had been offered by the military during Reconstruction, Finney apparently released his prisoner, allegedly for payment of some money by one of Longley's cousins.

Longley once again took to the road, but he showed up at his parents' farm in Bell County at Christmastime 1874. With his 15-year-old brother Jim in tow, he rode down to his old stomping grounds at Evergreen in Lee County to visit an uncle, Cale Longley. Once there, the two brothers learned that their cousin, "Little Cale," was dead, supposedly killed by an old boyhood friend of Bill's, Wilson Anderson. Uncle Cale urged Bill to avenge his cousin's death by killing Anderson.

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