Prairie dog lawyers

We don’t usually mention lawyers when we talk about the hardships our pioneer ancestors endured on the Texas frontier but we should. Being a pioneer anywhere meant doing without the civilities of civilization, at least for a while. Frontier lawyers had to ply their trade without the luxury of, well, law. 

In its absence these early lawyers tinkered with jurors’ emotions, sympathies and a code of gentlemanly honor that commanded a man to kill any man who questioned or challenged that honor. The prairie dog lawyers were dependent almost exclusively on the jury and felt that the court was just a “useless appendage in the hall of justice.”  

Out in the Texas Panhandle, people called these early barristers “Prairie Dog Lawyers” and not as a compliment. The lawyers, not an overly sensitive lot, adopted the phrase as their own. In an essay for the Panhandle Plains Historical Society in 1929, Judge Thomas Turner wrote that the term evolved from an epithet into a badge of honor.

 “While it originated in a spirit of ridicule, many of those who were so classified made it famous and respected,” he wrote, later adding that the early lawyers were far from perfect “but they were strong, rugged characters, true to their clients and their profession.” 

The Panhandle lawyers and those working elsewhere on the western frontier worked in a time and a place when murder was usually referred to as a “killing” because murder made it sound like the defendant actually did something wrong. Livestock theft was a crime every time but murder was considered “one of the probable contingencies of ordinary social life.” 

To be a prosecuting attorney on the Panhandle frontier was to know defeat unless a horse thief or cattle rustler happened to make it to trial without getting shot or hanged first, which was rare. But a killer needed his day in court.

Dallas County Judge Nathaniel Macon Burford, an early day Dallas County Judge, expressed the prevailing attitude when he opened an early session of the grand jury after a couple of adult libations on the way to the courthouse. 

“Gentlemen of the Grand Jury,” he began, “they tell us that more men are killed in Texas than in any country in the world, and I guess that’s a fact, but gentlemen of the Grand Jury, I tell you that more men need killing in Texas than in any other country in the world.”

All a defense lawyer had to do was persuade a jury to see the killing from the killer’s point of view rather than the victim’s, which usually meant convincing a jury that the victim needed killing. John Wesley Hardin was just one of countless psychopaths who went to his grave claiming, “I never killed a man who didn’t need killing.” 

In his excellent 2006 book, Getting Away With Murder on the Texas Frontier: Notorious Killings and Celebrated Trials, author and long-time West Texas attorney Bill Neal recounts a jarring number of examples of killers going free, even if the prosecutors presented murder weapons, credible eyewitnesses, a confession, or all of those things. 

The attorney in Neal helps him spot legal blunders and quirks in the law to explain some of the dramatic and counterintuitive verdicts, but sometimes there was nothing a poor prosecutor could do, as in the case of an obviously guilty miscreant who went free because one of the jurors had just made a pair of boots for him. 

“The son-of-a-gun is guilty all right, but we must turn him loose,” the bootmaker said. “If we convict him, I’ll never get my money.”