Poker Alice Tubbs and Joe Palmer's shootout with the “Louisiana Kid.” Creede, Colorado, 1892

"Poker Alice Tubbs"
Dealing faro
staged photo

(Click image to enlarge)

 

 

on’t shoot anymore! Don’t shoot anymore! You’ve knocked both my thumbs off!”

On February 11, 1892 Soap Gang member Joe Palmer shoots it out with the “Louisiana Kid.” Both of Palmer’s thumb-tips are shot off and the “Kid” receives upper body wounds, but escapes. It is believed the “Kid” was found deceased and became the corpse used in the manufacturing of McGinty the petrified man.

The famous professional female gambler, "Poker Alice" Tubbs, who dealt Faro across the street from the Orleans Club in Bob Ford’s Exchange, gave her firsthand account of this same gunfight in an interview she did in 1927 with the Saturday Evening Post (December 3, 1927):

. . . I was returning to my little log cabin in Creede when suddenly, from both sides of me, shots began to spurt in the semidarkness of the little town. Vaguely I saw a man behind a woodpile and another opposite, each with a revolver and each pulling the trigger with intent to kill. I did the natural thing—I made for the first and nearest saloon, since saloons were about the most plentiful of business houses in the town. Steve Scribner’s place was handiest, and while Steve tried to push the door closed to lock it I pushed as enthusiastically to get in, while the shooting went on behind me.
     “Let me in!” I shouted. “It’s only Poker Alice!”
      There was nothing else, incidentally, for Scribner to do; I was jammed in the door by this time. Wilder and wilder the shooting became, suddenly to cease that the noise of exploding cartridges might give way to heightened wailing.
      “I’m a son of a gun!” said Steve Scribner beside me in the darkness. “is that one of those fellows who’s just been shooting to kill? He’s bawling like a baby!”
     The sound grew louder, accompanied by words:
     “Don’t shoot anymore! Don’t shoot anymore! You’ve knocked both my thumbs off!”
     Then the battle, which had been intended a moment before as a struggle unto death, became quickly an affair of humor.
     “Listen to the big baby cry!” shouted the man who had shot off his assailant’s thumbs.
     “Oh, what a baby!” echoed the spectators, flooding now from behind barricades and other selected spots of protection. The howling man, mourning the loss of his thumbs, found himself the owner of a new nickname. He was 'Baby Joe' and 'Baby Joe' he stayed as long as I can remember. [1]
     Now if someone happens to get both thumbs shot off in a gunfight, I’d say they are entitled to a bit of crying, but apparently, people were a tougher lot and things were a bit different in Creede in 1892. Another eyewitness to this scrape gave an account that showed Joe Palmer in a more favorable light:

      “In those days,” said the man with the broad white hat, “Creede was a booming camp. You can make books on that. And it was a camp that it pleased an old timer to set foot in. Tenderfeet were not stacking up against the fellows then. It was a reminder of Deadwood and Leadville. It was reminiscence of forty-nine."
     “But as I was saying, that fight that Joe Palmer made against the ‘Orleans Kid’ ['Louisiana Kid.'] was as good and game a fight as a man ever saw. . . . Down in Creede he ran a house for Jeff Smith. The Kid came in there one night and got noisy and abusive. The fact that he had killed four men didn’t cut a figure with Joe, and he politely but firmly told him to get out. The Kid left sulkily, and we fellows at the tables watching the play between turns of the cards, just took a flier, in our inner consciousness, that there’d be trouble before morning.
     “Joe stepped out of the place a little afterward. He was gone but a moment or two when we hear a shot. We sprang up from our chips, leaving our bets on the layout, and rushed outside. And there we saw a fight!
     “Palmer was standing in the middle of the street right under the electric light. In the bright glare he was the fairest of targets. The Kid was by the corner in the shadow of the stores. Both of them were blazing away at less than 30 paces. The Kid’s second bullet struck Joe in the thumb of his pistol hand, and the gun fell to the ground. Joe picked it up with his left hand and went on shooting. Another bullet from The Kid struck Joe’s left thumb, and the six shooter dropped again. We all thought Joe would run then for sure, because we couldn’t see how he could ever cock his gun to keep up the fight. He stooped over, as cool as you please, grabbed his gun in his right hand and cocked it by rubbing it downward against his leg.

“When the two men had used up all the cartridges and the fight was over, the Kid staggered away. He had lost. Four of Joe’s six bullets had hit him . . .” [2]

 SOURCES:

[1] Cooper, Courtney Ryley, The Saturday Evening Post, December 3, 1927, p. 109.
[2] Colorado Daily Chieftan, March 2, 1895.

HAUNTED CREEDE: Special thanks to Kandra Payne, author of Haunted Creede, who made me aware of this article in The Saturday Evening Post.

Joe Palmer and the Louisiana Kid:
November 9, 2016

Joe Palmer and the Louisiana Kid: pages 212-213, 220, 245.

"My last piece of advice to the degenerate slot player who thinks he can beat the one-armed bandit consists of four little words: ‘It can't be done.’"

—John Scarne