King Fisher: The Short Life and Elusive Legend of a Texas Desperado

America’s Wild West created an untold number of notorious characters, and in southwestern Texas, John King Fisher (1855-1884) was foremost among them. To friends and foes alike, he insisted he be called “King.” Standing over six feet tall, a dark and handsome man, King often dressed as a frontier dandy. A Texas Ranger remembered King as wearing an “ornamented Mexican sombrero, a black Mexican jacket embroidered with gold, a crimson sash and boots, with two silver-plated, ivory-handled revolvers swinging from his belt.” Early in life King fell victim to bad influences. After a stint in Huntsville Prison as a teenager, he found a home in the tough sun-beaten Nueces Strip, a lawless land between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande. There he gathered a gang of rustlers around him at his ranch on Pendencia Creek. For a decade King and his gang raided both sides of the Rio Grande, shooting down any who opposed them. Newspapers claimed King avoided the penalties prescribed by law by killing potential witnesses—in spite of many charges he was never convicted of cattle or horse stealing, or murder. King’s reign ended when he was arrested by Texas Ranger Captain Leander McNelly. In no uncertain terms he advised Fisher to change his ways. Having emerged victorious in gunfights with outlaws from across the Rio Grande, King Fisher chose a life style which would prove to be just as dangerous—deputy sheriff of Uvalde County. Now he would enforce the law, with his badge as well as his six-shooter. But his hard-won respectability would not last. On a spring night in 1884, King made the mistake of accompanying the truly notorious gambler and gunfighter Ben Thompson on a tour of San Antonio, where several years prior, over a gambling dispute, Thompson shot down Jack Harris at the latter’s saloon and theater, the Vaudeville. Recklessly, King Fisher accompanied Thompson back to the theater to call upon Harris’s former partners. Warned of their coming, assassins were waiting. Within minutes of entering the theater, when the smoke cleared, Fisher was stretched out beside Thompson, dead from thirteen gunshot wounds. Read more