Judge Roy Bean: The Law West of The Pecos

Phantly (his real first name)  Roy Bean, Jhr. was born in Mason County, Kentucky in 1825 and by the age of 16 had hitched a ride on a flatboat to New Orleans.  From there he hightailed it to San Antonio, Texas where he met up with an older brother, Sam.  In 1848, the pair opened a trading post in Chihuahua, Mexico where Roy shot to death a Mexican national.  Sam and Roy, in order to avoid charges, fled to Sonora and later Roy moved to San Diego to be with another brother, Joshua.  After spending time in jail for wounding a man in a pistol duel he moved to San Gabriel, California and tended bar at his brother’s saloon and when his brother was murdered, inherited the business.
 
image via wikipedia

Bean began a courtship with a young woman who was kidnapped and forced to marry a Mexican army officer.  Bean killed the man.  Several of the officer’s amigos put Bean on a horse with a rope around his neck tied to a tree and rode away expecting him to hang.  However, the horse didn’t move and the unwilling bride, who was hiding nearby, cut her hero down.  He suffered little more than a permanent rope burn around his throat.

In 1861, Sam and Roy Bean opened a general store and saloon in Pinos Altos, New Mexico but Roy took the money from the store safe and joined the Texas Army and ran a blockade hauling cotton to British ships off the coast of Matamoros.  Later he would operate a firewood business, lore would have us believe, by cutting down his neighbor’s timber.  He started a dairy operation but was allegedly caught watering down the milk and finally became a butcher by rustling unbranded cattle from nearby ranches.
                                                   
image via wikipedia    (Sculpture at Whitehead Memorial Museum, Del Rio, Texas)