Ketchum Goes Out Alone
Tom "Black Jack" Ketchum vs. Frank Harrington.
By: Bob Boze Bell 02/01/2009
August 16, 1899
Camped in a cave, two miles south of Folsom, New Mexico, Tom Ketchum waits until dark, then mounts up. He leads a pack horse carrying his safe-blowing kit. The outlaw rides to a spot on the Colorado & Southern Railroad tracks, hitches his horses, builds a fire and starts walking toward Folsom.
It is 10:20 p.m. and the southbound train No. 1 is running 10 minutes late. When the train reaches him, Ketchum climbs in the cab of the engine and sticks the barrel of his pistol in the engineer’s ribs, ordering Joseph H. Kirchgrabber to stop the train at a point four miles south
of Folsom.
The train is stopped on a curve with a four-foot high embankment (two miles short of Ketchum’s campfire). Ketchum orders the engineer out of the cab, but Kirchgrabber refuses.
“You son of a bitch, I’ll kill you,” threatens Ketchum, pushing his Winchester into the trainman’s armpit before adding, “I’ll shoot if you don’t.”
The engineer coolly defies him: “Shoot away.”
Ketchum turns his attention to the fireman, Tom Scanlon, who steps down with no argument and leads the outlaw to the door of the express car.
Hearing a banging on the door, express car messenger Charles P. “Scotty” Drew opens the door and finds himself looking down the barrel of Ketchum’s Winchester.
“Fall out of there goddamn quick,” the outlaw snaps; Drew complies. While Drew holds a lantern, Scanlon is ordered to uncouple the express car from the coal tender. He has difficulty doing so as the cars are attached via a coupling device, called a “Miller hook,” which is programmed to lock whenever a train is halted on a curve.
Several times, mail clerk Fred Bartlett peeks out from the mail car (the second car, back from the coal tender). Spotting his head, Ketchum barks, “Get back in there!” as he also fires a warning shot that glances off a steel brace on the car and ricochets through Bartlett’s jaw, taking out two teeth. He falls, face forward, onto the floor of the car.
Finally, Scanlon tells the outlaw he has uncoupled the cars. But when the three return to the engine, they discover the train will not budge. Scanlon merely cut the air hose that sealed the brakes on all the coaches behind the express car.
Angry, and on edge, Ketchum says to the engineer, “If you don’t come back there, I’ll kill you. I want you to cut the baggage car off.”
This time, Kirchgrabber complies and sets to work uncoupling the car.
Meanwhile, in the back of the train, conductor Frank Harrington (who has been robbed twice before on this same run) unpacks his shotgun, assembles it and walks through the cars. Slowly losing his nerve, he comes upon Bartlett, who is moaning and muttering that he is “bleeding to death.”
Harrington resolves to “kill somebody or be killed himself.” Peering out the end door, he sees four men standing below him. He throws the door open and fires from the hip. Instantly, Ketchum reacts and starts to shoot, but as he turns, 11 buckshots strike the outlaw above the right elbow. Ketchum’s bullet nicks Harrington’s left sleeve, as the outlaw is knocked off his feet and tumbles down the embankment.
The train crew scrambles for safety, while Ketchum stumbles up the bank and reels across the tracks in front of the locomotive. He takes a couple potshots at the lantern, his bullets thudding into the side of the mail car. Then he’s gone.
The train crew dresses Harrington’s wound and fixes the brake system, and 35 minutes later skedaddles down track to Clayton and safety. A hundred yards north of the tracks, Ketchum collapses. He, too, will eventually make it to Clayton, where he remains to this day.
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