from "The Midlands" by James J. Fisher

Junction City, KANS.--Probably not a dozen living Kansans have ever heard of Thomas Allen Cullinan, the tough Irishman who ruled this town as marshal for the last 30 years of the 19th century.

But consider:

Although Irish, he became the master of an English vessel, no small feat considering the antipathy of the British at that time for their kin across the Irish Sea.

Coming to America he was a Great Lakes sailor, river pilot, lumberjack, gold miner, sutler and Civil War Scout.

In 1860, accompanied by two other men, he descended the first 250 miles of the Colorado River toward California before being captured by the Ute Indians. If not for the Utes, the name Cullinan probably would be in the history books instead of that of John Wesley Powell, the first man to trace the river to the sea. Mr. Powell made his journey in 1869.

Mr. Cullinan's pre-Junction City accomplishments would fade, however, during his 30 years service to this U.S. Army post town. From 1871 to 1900, with time out for a couple of years as chief enforcement officer for the Metropolitan Street Railway in Kansas City, Tom Cullinan ran this town with an iron hand.

Civil libertarians would've hated Mr. Cullinan. Writing of the town marshall, one contemporary said:

"In the '70s and the '80s, when the town was more turbulent than of late, he enforced the law in his own way with the hearty approval of the entire population. That is, if Tom deemed it proper, he could take a man before police court or lock him up, and it was all right.

"If he deemed it proper to administer the law by walloping the earth with a loafer, that too was deemed all right."

Mr. Cullinan was very good with his fists. There were countless stories of roughneck Army recruits, loose on their first pass and full of liquor, going back to Fort Riley in ambulances after tangling with Mr. Cullinan. George Martin, later secretary of the Kansas Historical Society and, for a time, mayor of Junction City, recalled instances in which Mr. Cullinan corralled and locked up six or seven men at a time, using only his fists. Mr. Martin said Mr. Cullinan was actually afraid of the gun he carried, knowing that once it was loosed from its holster, all sorts of nasty things could happen.

And, of course, Mr. Cullinan's reluctance to use a gun ultimately meant that he would be forgotten by history. He was not Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson or Wild Bill Hickok, quick with a pistol or shotgun, men to be found--at least in the mind's eye of the dime novelists and the Hollywood directors--dealing cards at a poker table and then rising when trouble reared its head and going into the street for the classic confrontation with a doomed miscreant.

The disappearance into the mists of history in the case of Mr. Cullinan wasn't uncommon. West of here at Abilene, one of the greatest of the cattle towns, there's a Tom Smith Street, a Tom Smith Stadium and a 2-ton granite block marking the grave at the Abilene cemetery. Tom Smith?

Mr. Smith, like Mr. Cullinan, cleaned up his town with his fists in 1870, resigned to become a deputy U.S. marshal and, unfortunately, was beheaded by an ax-wielding man he was trying to arrest near Chapman Creek. The people of Abilene didn't forget, but history, again in the form of the dime novel, did. It ignored Mr. Smith but almost beatified Hickok, the latter a man whom Abilene residents recalled as one whose "bearing and bravery were of a low type."

Nobody ever said that of Tom Cullinan. In 1884 an amateur prizefighter came to Junction City from Clay Center expressly to test Mr. Cullinan's mettle. The man raised a ruckus in the afternoon. Mr. Cullinan told him to get out of town. The man, a red-haired fellow, didn't, and raised another row.

Finally, at the Pacific House, the marshal had had enough.

"Now, I will take you in," Mr. Cullinan told the man. The man slapped Mr. Cullinan in the mouth, uttering some foolishness about Mr. Cullinan's manhood.

That was a mistake. In seconds, Mr. Cullinan had "beat the man to tatters," especially on the head. A few hours later the man was on an east-bound train, never to return, a mass of dried and clotted blood from the top of his head to his waist.

That was Tom Cullinan. Nothing fancy, but he got the job done. And in 1904 he died in bed.