John Edwin Kessell (1833-1908) married
Elizabeth Bullock of Ruthers. One of her five brothers was Richard Bullock
featured below.
(from an article in the Sunday Independant Nov 29th 1981, by Dr Douglas Selleck)
The heroes of the pistol-packing days of the Wild West are as popular as ever. Few people will know that one of the greatest legendary figures of the cowboy era was in fact a crackshot Cornishman who once sang in a Methodist Chapel Choir.
His name was Deadwood Dick. His real name was Richard Bullock who was born at Ruthros (Ruthers) near St Columb on August 20th 1847. His father, John Bullock was foreman of a clayworks at Retew, and as such had the customary title of Captain. His five sons, all well-built lads, naturally worked under him.
The whole family worshipped together as well, at Queens United Methodist Free Church, Richard as a boy and young man was a member of the choir. Life with the Bullock family was not all work and chapel, their favourite sport was shooting. Richard (or Dick as he was usually called) was fascinated by pigeon shooting. At eighteen he was already a crackshot.
His friend, Ned Hocking of Fraddon, told the story of their first shooting match at St Stephen-in-Brannel 'Feast Week'. On their way to the match, Dick told a roadman they met that they would show him the first and second prizes on their way back, and they did just that. The story was often told how Dick's dog flushed out four partridges, two of which flew left and two right, and how he got two with one barrel and the other pair with a second barrel.
Dick married a local girl, Susie Poad. At an early morning Christmas Day service in 1873, he caused some amusement in chapel by singing as a chorister 'Unto us a child is born' for his son Maurice had been born a few days previously.
No fortune could be made as a Victorian clay labourer, in fact hardly a living for a family, and Dick, as so many other Cornish miners, decided to face long years of separation from his wife and baby son and sail to an American El Dorado, in his case located in the Black Hills of South Dakota, mining not for clay or tin, but gold.
As other hard working miners, he became exasperated by the regularity with which the gold carrying stage-coaches were held up and robbed. He decided to do something about it and, exchanging shovel for six-shooter, volunteered as a bullion guard for the Homestake Mine, then owned by Senator George Hearst, the father of William Randolph Hearst who at this time was beginning to build his newspaper empire.
The gold was carried in the Deadwood stage
(famed in story and song) along the perilous route from Cheyenne to Deadwood via
Laramie.
It ran through Buffalo Gap, Lame Johnny Creek, Red Canyon and Squaw Gap, all notorious haunts of bandits such as Peg Leg Bradley, Dunk Blackburn and Curly Grimes, not to mention the Sioux Indians. In its time, it carried such fabulous passengers as Calamity Jane, Wild Bill Hickock and Buffalo Bill. The coach itself was later acquired by Buffalo Bill for the Wild West Show with which he toured the world. It was a handsome vehicle, though of course very strongly built to run on the atrocious tracks that served as roads in the West. It had a red painted body, yellow wheels, and each door had a handsome picture of a landscape. It carried nine persons inside and eight outside. It sounds incongruous to say that they travelled to Deadwood on the 'Concord', but this was the name of the coach after its place of manufacture in New Hampshire.
The bandits must have rued the day in 1882 that
Dick started riding shotgun. The notorious Lame Johnny for one tried to hold up
the coach, but never made it back to his creek. When, at Hurricane Flats, he
calmly stepped out into the road, pistols in hand, Dick dropped him in his
tracks.
His quick shooting soon earned him the name of Deadwood Dick and he became under that name the subject of local newspaper reports. Although he enclosed these cuttings in letters home to Cornwall, he was not a great writer and said little about his part in the stories.
Guns and sporting dogs were the main subject of letters to his father and Ned Hocking. The Methodist choir-boy, who had now proved his skill in shooting bandits as well as partridges, acquired a taste for the job and left the Homestake Mine job to battle with the 'baddies' as official or unofficial lawman wherever in the West his services were required. It was now that he became quite literally 'a legend in his own lifetime'. Educational progress in America, as in Europe, had produced newly literate millions to be entertained by the written word.
So sprang up the Dime Novel, selling at ten
cents apiece to hundreds of thousands of people who normally could not afford
books at all. Author Edward L Wheeler, having seen the newspaper reports, made
Deadwood Dick the subject of one of them. The book sold well and from now on
imagination and invention made him into a character, if not larger than, very
different from life. Thus began the unending avalanche of 'pulp' Westerns, and
it is amazing how constantly the characters and places in them are those of
South Dakota, in Dick Bullock's time there. When first the silent films came,
and then the talkies, these provided the basis of hundreds of films and many
songs, a standard example being 'The Deadwood Stage'.
Dick Bullock spent his last years in the company of a couple of other 'Homestake' bullion guards, Herbert Eakin and W R Dickinson at Thorncroft Sanatorium, Glendale, California, probably, one guesses, being maintained there by Mr Hearst. There he died peacefully in his bed at the age of 73, in 1921. So close to Hollywood, where his celluloid ghosts rode on, so far from Cornwall, where his family still lived in the world of china clay and chapel he had known half a century before.