The Earl of excess

The party that Joseph Heneage Finch threw at Big Spring in December of 1884 lasted two weeks and featured copious amounts of alcohol and who knows what else. Finch, an English nobleman turned West Texas rancher, was the life of the legendary party right up until the moment, on Jan. 13, 1885, when he uttered what might have been his final words— “Good-bye, boys”— and went to his bed, closed his eyes and never woke up. 

A local doctor who prepared his body for shipment back to England reported that Finch’s liver was hard as a rock and weighed either 14 or 30 pounds; accounts vary. The same doctor allegedly informed Finch he had 15 minutes to live less than 15 minutes before Finch went to bed and died, a month shy of his 36^th birthday. 

In England, Finch was known informally as “Sporting Joe” because of his outdoor and athletic pursuits but he was addressed formally as the Seventh Earl of Aylesford. The people of West Texas refused to call him Earl because that wasn’t his name. John Birdwell, a former buffalo hunter and Finch’s running buddy in Texas, told him, “You know, that just ain’t gonna fly around here. We’ll just call you Judge.” 

The West Texans knew little or nothing about Judge other than he liked to drink; he preferred mutton to beef; he bathed daily; he had a seemingly unlimited supply of money; and he was extremely generous. They knew nothing of his global escapades with Albert, Prince of Wales, soon to become King Edward VII of England, or how the two royal roustabouts embarked on a scheduled 17-week “goodwill tour” of India in 1875. 

The Judge and Prince Albert’s version of goodwill called for a lot of whiskey drinking and animal killing. Finch’s long-suffering wife, the former Edith Williams, stayed home in England and carried on without him in an overtly adulterous manner. The Earl caught wind of the situation and rushed home to confront his wife and file for divorce, a no-no among royals of the day. The divorce proceedings revealed the Earl’s own adulterous forays, which led Queen Victoria to suggest, with royal authority, that he leave England and stay wherever he went.

The British courts curtailed Finch’s remittance to $50,000 a year (more like $1 million in today’s money) and Finch, the poor pauper, set sail for the U.S. In New York, railroad magnate Jay Gould suggested the young royal take his remittance and sense of adventure to the wide-open spaces of Texas where Gould just happened to be building railroads that needed people living nearby. 

Finch and his entourage arrived in Big Spring in 1883 and inquired at the local hotel about a room. Told that the hotel was full, the Earl offered to buy the hotel. The owner named a price twice what it was worth. Finch paid cash on the spot and evicted the people in the two most expensive rooms. He returned the hotel to the owner the next day with the understanding that those two rooms would always be reserved for him. 

Soon after that he built a meat market (the first permanent structure in Big Spring) to supply him with mutton, which was in short supply in cattle country. He owned the local saloon for one day and everyone drank for free while he was in charge. The locals began to suspect this English dude might be all right after all. Finch bought a 25,000-acre ranch north of town and $40,000 worth of cattle, sight unseen, and moved into a plain story-and-a-half wooden house outside of town. 

A Chicago reporter, investigating reports of a royal castle on the Texas prairie, described the walls of the house as being “covered with rifles, shot guns, revolvers, derringers, cartridge belts, spurs, game bags and other articles of the same sort in bewildering numbers.” 

A pile of empty bottles “as big as a haystack” was made up of three-fourths whiskey bottles and one-fourth beer bottles, according to the diligent reporter. 

Saloon records that Howard County historian John Hutto uncovered during research for his 1938 county history revealed that the Judge routinely ordered a half gallon of whiskey a day and sometimes a quart bottle or two of gin as a booster. Hutto also noted that the Judge “carried his whiskey well” and rarely appeared to be under the influence. 

Unlike most Europeans with fancy titles who owned Texas ranches, Finch was popular with the cowboys on his ranch. From the Chicago reporter: “There is much to be said to the Earl’s credit in his association with the cowboys, and he has won their confidence in a most remarkable manner…  no knight ever had a more loyal legion.”