One-Armed Bill Wilson

The Coolest Man in the Outfit

In 1867, on a sandbar beneath a bluff on the Pecos River, a one-armed cowboy did something most of us wouldn’t have survived. With a Comanche war party camped all around him, he stripped down to his hat and his underclothes, slipped into the dark current, and swam for his life. He then walked something like three days across the bare plains of Texas with no boots and no food, beating wolves back with a broken tepee pole, all to carry word that his friend was dying.

His name was William J. Wilson, though just about everybody who knew him called him One-Armed Bill.

Bill Wilson

Unfortunately, we don’t know as much about Wilson’s early life.

Legend has it he was raised on the Texas frontier, and that his mother was shot and killed as she ran for the safety of a fort on the Brazos, leaving Bill’s father a widower with eight children to feed. As for the missing arm, take your pick. One account says a horse bit it off when he was barely a toddler, and another claims he was born without it. All we know for certain is that he went through life with one arm and did nearly everything a two-armed cowboy could, only better than most.

By his early twenties, he had raised a small herd of his own cattle and threw in with a bigger outfit headed for Fort Sumner, figuring there was safety in numbers. That larger outfit just so happened to belong to the now-famous Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving. In fact, Goodnight would even refer to Wilson as the clearest-headed man in the outfit, and the trail boss reportedly called him the coolest man he had. I’d say that’s high praise in a business full of rough characters.

Charles Goodnight

Later on during the drive, when the restless (and somewhat reckless) Loving wanted to ride out ahead of the herd to bid on government beef contracts, Goodnight trusted exactly one man to ride with him: Bill Wilson.

The deal was that the pair would travel only by night, but that lasted just a couple of days before Loving talked Wilson into making better time by daylight. Sure enough, a large Comanche raiding party spotted them out in the open, and they were forced to make a four-mile run to the Pecos, where they took cover at the foot of a bluff. When a parley turned into an ambush, Loving caught a bullet through the wrist that drove on into his side.

Badly hit and certain he was finished, Loving instructed Wilson to slip away and get word back to Goodnight. So Wilson stripped down, took the prized Henry rifle into the river with him, and quickly learned that a one-armed man can’t swim and carry a rifle at the same time. He propped it underwater against the bank where he hoped the Comanches wouldn’t find it and kept going, drifting right past a mounted warrior splashing in the shallows. Then came the barefoot march, the cactus and stickers, the wolves circling him every night, and the broken tepee pole he used for a walking stick. When Goodnight’s men finally found him, Goodnight said he was the most terrible object he had ever seen, his feet so swollen and torn that he left blood in every track.

Wilson’s report sent Goodnight straight back out with a handful of men, and the directions held up. They rode right to the spot where the two men had forted up and even turned up a page from Loving’s own notebook pinned to a thorn, but Loving was already gone. He had slipped down the river on his own.

Loving, against all odds, had made his own escape and reached Fort Sumner, but gangrene set into the wrist, and he died on September 25, 1867. Goodnight kept a deathbed promise and hauled his partner’s body all the way home to Texas in a tin coffin, in what one historian called the strangest and most touching funeral procession in the history of the cow country.

As for Bill Wilson, he just kept right on living and trailing cattle. At least he did until finally succumbing to pneumonia on April 24, 1922, in Lawton, Oklahoma.

One-Armed Bill Wilson never got a statue or a ballad. He spent a terrible afternoon doing something almost nobody else could have done, and then went back to being a working cowboy and stayed one as long as he was able. Which, if you ask me, is exactly the kind of person we like to celebrate here on The Wild West Extravaganza.