"WILD WEST” COLONEL KILLED BY TAXI

Taranaki Daily News, 23 February 1935, Page 15 (Supplement)

"WILD WEST” COLONEL KILLED BY TAXI

rOUGHT INDIANS AND CATTLE THIEVES IN TOMBSTONE TpAMOUS as the editor who produced his newspaper with scissors, pastepot, and a revolver, in the pioneer days of the Wild West, Colonel Richard Caleb Shaw has died in New York. He was a victim, paradoxically enough, of a taxicab accident. After surviving many hair-raising adventures among Indians, cattle thieves, and gunmen, he was knocked down in Broadway five years ago. His skull was fractured, and his shoulder badly injured. He was forced to give up his wanderings, and his death is attributed to his old injuries. He was within a few days bf his 81st birthday. It was in the 80’s that he ran the “Tombstone Epitaph” in Tombstone, Arizona, while acting as manager of the Toughnut Gold Mine. He had to carry his “six-shooter” like most of his neighbours, but he usually talked rather than shot his way out of tight corners. J On one occasion a group of cowboys called to “shoot him up” for applying to them in print the phrase “innocuous desuetude.” He saved his life by convincing them, with the help of a dictionary, that he had not been insulting. His paper, containing as it did innumerable obituary notices of heroes of the West, was well named.

He was born in Canada of a Scottish farmer and a Basque mother from the Spanish Pyrenees. He became a wanderer at an early age, and before he reached the twenties

he saw the Sheriff of Abilene, Kansas, shoot a man dead by taking aim in a mirror and firing over his shoulder. The man, who had entered the saloon with the intention of killing the sheriff, dropped dead at the door with a bullet between the eyes. The sheriff finished his drink before turning round.