On the Trail with Sheriff Will Diaz – Legend from Conejos County – Frank Hyatt – Old West Detective – On the Trail – Pt 1

Part one –

The stories have to come from someplace. You read about the Old West in books by Zane Gray. You see TV shows like Gunsmoke and the like. And every once in while, you see a story of a lawman that went bad.

In the late 1800s, the Lawman and the Bad Man were often the same guy. Some times it was a matter of geography that defined which side of the equation they were on.

Frank is one of what I call “Professional Lawmen.” They weren’t just gunfighters. They were closer to today’s police officers. They knew the law, used investigative methods, and tried to live to some manner of standard.

He’s almost completely unknown as well.

Frank was also a deputy from my home county of Conejos. He and I served in the same department.

Because of that, I mention him often in my Lawman series. One of the things Will Diaz has in his office is a drawing. It’s from an old book called “Hands Up.” It features a shootout between three men that occurred in what is now Alamosa, Colorado. I have the same print on my wall. One of the men his Frank. The other is a part time marshal named Hank Dorris. The third we’ll get to eventually.

In the next several entries, I hope to cover one of his major cases. One, that again, few people have heard of. But you’ve seen it time and again in countless books and movies.

***

There were no restaurant guides in June of 1881 to give a review in. And if there had been, it’s doubtful Deputy Frank Hyatt would have bothered. But if he had, it might have read “dismal decor, but service is good, and food isn’t bad. But they really need to do something about some of the people they allow in.”

As he ate his breakfast in a small restaurant in Bernalillo, New Mexico, his mind was far from food. Bernalillo wasn’t the city we know today. The streets were dirt, the buildings an odd mishmash of wooden structures and adobe. And the people looked different. They were divided along ethnic lines more. There were men dressed much like Frank was. There were the locals. Some were dressed in colorful cloth as some of the Mexicans tended to while others were dressed more plainly. Some Native Americans walked about in blankets wrapped around them like robes.

Since it was early morning, Frank found a small restaurant owned by a Mexican family. It was almost right across from the train station and that made it easy. The restaurant was part of their home and they’d taken one room and placed tables in it. Frank took a table in the corner.

“Cafe, Senor?” the man who owned the place asked.

“Por favor,” Frank replied.

The man brought his coffee and Frank ordered his meal.

History doesn’t record what he was eating that morning. Since it was in Bernalillo, New Mexico, my bet is beans with a tortilla. Since it was breakfast, maybe he had eggs with the meal. The eggs would have come from chickens locally owned. Maybe there was a strip or two of green chili (a meal I recommend you try – it’s amazing). If Frank were to say the meal was good, it was probably because he was hungry.

But, he wasn’t there to enjoy the food.

He was hunting a fellow lawman gone bad.

The lawman in question was called Charlie Allison. Like so many desperados of the old west, that wasn’t his real name. If you inquired in Nevada, they’d have told you that he his real name was Charlie Ennis of of Chicago. He was wanted in Nevada under that name.

Story has it, Ennis came from a well to do family. When his parents passed, he stood to inherit a whopping ten-thousand dollars. In today’s money, that amounts to a little over a quarter of a million dollars. While not a huge sum of money, it’s also nothing to sneeze at. Trouble was, it would be some time before he received it.

Instead of waiting for it, Ennis left Chicago. He never collected a dime of it.

Instead, he came out West and landed in Nevada. He pursued a life of rustling livestock.

He wasn’t very good at it. He got caught. On his way to prison, he managed to escape, and turned up in Conejos County, Colorado.

He became friendly with Sheriff Joe Smith of the Conejos Sheriff’s Office. Conejos County covered a fair part of the south western part of the new state. Needing men to handle it, Sheriff Smith hired him as a deputy.

Initially, he did a good job. I found a couple of old newspaper articles where he was called in to testify.

But what we had here was a classic example of the fox watching the hen house.

While he ate, I’m sure Frank thought about Allison. “Charlie, ” he must have said to himself. “What happened. I know you. We worked together. And now, here I am, hunting you.”

Frank touched his jacket, feeling the envelope with the warrant in it. That piece of paper gave him all the authority he needed to pursue Allison across New Mexico.

Frank smashed one of the fried eggs, stirred it in with beans, and scooped it up onto the tortilla. Without realizing it, the young deputy had invented the breakfast burrito. As he ate, he thought more about Charlie Allison.

Charlie was already a deputy when he started to go bad. He met a couple of guys named Lewis Perkins and Henry Watts. These men were wanted elsewhere too. But when they met Charlie, they looked around and realized the pickings were great in the Valley and Conejos county.

While the rails hadn’t been extended through the Valley and beyond yet, there were stage coaches. Stages carried passengers with money. They also carried silver, gold, and cash money from and to the mines. All of this went through the rail terminus in Alamosa, Colorado.

It wasn’t long before the lure of untold amounts of money rolling past called to Charlie and his team.

With a badge still in his pocket, Allison and his friends began robbing the stage coaches. There’s not an exact known amount they got away with. But it must have been enough. It simply emboldened them to try for bigger stakes.

“Bigger stakes” meant raiding the community of Chama, New Mexico. The tactic was simple. They came in shooting up the place and forcing everyone to dive for cover. Than they walked into the stores, emptied the tills, and took whatever else they wanted.

The tactic worked very well because a few days later they did it again. Only this time, it was in Pagosa Springs, Colorado. One article says they walked boldly into at least one store. There, they held everyone at gunpoint, robbed patrons and store alike, and got away with some $450.00 (about 12K in today’s money – not a bad day’s work).

There was a problem.

Something I reference in my novels often is a rule I call “Parker’s Law.” It comes from an old time cop I knew named Garland Parker. Garland said, “We catch criminals because they don’t plan on getting caught. If they’d planned on getting caught, chances are they wouldn’t have done what they did.”

Parker’s Law ensnared the trio. Someplace between the stage robberies and the raid in Pagosa Springs, the unthinkable happened. Allison hadn’t planned on being recognized, but surprise! He was. People knew Charlie Allison. He was one of the county deputies.

You see, it’s very simple. A law enforcement officer lives in a fish bowl. A person might not know many people in town, but they know the cops. That’s true today. It was just as true then.

“Mas, Cafe?” the owner asked coming around with a well-used metal coffee pot.

Frank put out his cup and as the owner filled his cup, every cops nightmare happened.

Charlie Allison and his friends walked through the open door of the restaurant.

Charlie looked right at Frank and Frank felt a cold chill run down his back.