Badass Page 18
Bass Reeves calmly took three steps toward the Brunter brothers, his grim face registering neither fear nor respect for these punk-ass bitches. He was an intimidating, serious-looking man, standing over six feet tall and solidly built. His clothes and equipment were nondescript, covered with the dust from several thousand miles of hard riding, hard fighting, and hard drinking. His beaten-up black hat and long black coat sported a variety of bullet holes and bloodstains. The brass star proudly displayed on his lapel was tarnished with age.
“What the hell are you doing out here, lawman?” the eldest Brunter brother demanded.
Bass spat. “Well, I’ve come to arrest you,” he said in the sort of nonchalant, matter-of-fact way that an evil mechanic tells you that you need a new transmission. “Got the warrant right here.” He reached into his coat pocket, produced a worn, folded-up piece of paper, and casually handed it to the eldest brother.
The Brunters all looked at each other in disbelief. They couldn’t believe the stupidity of the man standing before them to have admitted this fact as plainly as he had. Sure, they respected the fact he possessed what obviously must have been solid brass balls, but they were still definitely going to have to kill his ass.
The eldest brother unfolded the warrant and jokingly showed his brothers the lengthy list of serious charges leveled against them. The moment their collective eyes looked down toward the page, Reeves’s right hand twitched ever so slightly. Then, in a flash, he closed his fingers around the handle of the .45-caliber Colt Peacemaker strapped to his thigh, drew his weapon, and fired two shots from the hip in rapid succession. Both bullets hit home, sending two Brunters spinning into a dance of death. The eldest brother pointed his gun at the lawman’s head, but before he could fire it Bass Reeves was on him. Reeves grabbed the man’s revolver with one hand, redirected the weapon so it was pointing up into the air, and then proceeded to pistol-whip the dude unconscious with his free hand. In the span of about twenty seconds, the toughest U.S. marshal west of the Mississippi had just taken out three of the Indian Territory’s deadliest criminals.
Starting his life out as a young, illiterate slave belonging to Confederate colonel George Reeves, Bass was an unlikely candidate to become one of the most insane, over-the-top, jerky-chomping ass-kickers in the American West. Sure, he was big, tough, and strong, but for a lot of black slaves living in 1860s Texas there really wasn’t a whole lot available in the way of social mobility. Growing up, all Bass really had to look forward to was a lifetime of servitude and bullcrap menial labor.
Well, screw that. One day, Bass and Colonel Reeves were playing a nice friendly game of cards when all of a sudden things became a little less than friendly. The colonel was being a ten-gallon jackoff, so Bass leaned back and cold-cocked the dude in the chops with a lights-out roundhouse punch. Colonel Reeves hit the deck like a sack of lead potatoes, TKOed by a solid George Foreman-esque right hook.
Realizing that he’d basically just signed his own death warrant, Bass decided it was time to get the hell out of Dodge. He fled the plantation and traveled several miles north, crossing the Red River into Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). The law of the white man had no sway there, and Bass was soon taken in by the Seminole Indian tribe of Oklahoma.
While living with the Seminoles, Bass learned how to speak the languages of the Five Civilized Tribes, and trained himself in the arts of sweet badassitude. He enthusiastically took up shooting, becoming a deadly marksman with a rifle and developing an incredibly fast draw with pistols. He was ambidextrous, firing equally well with both hands, and dual-wielding pistols Chow Yun Fat–style. He even became such a crack shot with a rifle that that he was actually forbidden from participating in all competitive turkey shoots in the Indian Territories.
After the Thirteenth Amendment made the South a little less suck-tastic for black people, Bass Reeves left his adoptive home with the Indians, bought a house in Arkansas, got married, had like ten kids, and lived for a while as a farmer and a horse breeder. That was cool and all, but Bass Reeves was the kind of guy who was always looking to serve up a nice warm knuckle sandwich to anything capable of feeling pain, and he wasn’t happy living the boring life of a successful rancher. So when the infamous hardass “hanging judge” Isaac Parker put out a call for U.S. marshals in 1875, Bass was one of the first volunteers ready and willing to bring lethal hordes of armed-and-dangerous felons to justice. Thanks to his mammoth physical strength, tracking skills, intimate knowledge of the terrain, and language proficiency, he easily earned a spot on the force.
Now, back in the 1870s the Indian Territory was a sick murderous nightmare from hell. The vast uncharted expanse—nearly seventy-five thousand square miles of lawless terrain—was infested with fugitives, criminals, and escaped convicts, and was a horrible bitch that feasted on the broken dreams of wayward travelers and drank the blood of anyone foolhardy enough to cross her. It was up to guys like Bass Reeves and other U.S. marshals to go into the dangerous territory, hunt down murderers, rapists, bank robbers, bootleggers, legbooters, and cattle rustlers, and bring some of the West’s most dangerous outlaws in for some cowboy-style justice. Bass quickly proved that he was more than up to the task.
Going out on lone-wolf-style missions deep into unknown territory, Reeves relied on his toughness and his wits to survive and bring his men to justice. He used tactics he had learned from the Seminoles to traverse vast distances quickly and leave no trace of his trail. He tracked his foes down, never backed away from a job no matter how many bounties or death threats were leveled at him, and never blinked in the face of extreme danger. In thirty years of service, Bass Reeves arrested more than three thousand fugitives—including one trip to Comanche country when he single-handedly captured and brought in seventeen prisoners. He was also the man who took out the notorious bank robber and murderer Bob Dozier. Dozier had eluded capture from posses and lawmen for several years, but he wasn’t quite as adept at eluding a gunshot wound to the brain from Bass effing Reeves.
Another famous Reeves arrest was Belle Starr, the “Bandit Queen of Dallas,” who was a hard-drinkin’, hard-ridin’, hard-swearin’, gun-fightin’ hardass who enjoyed gambling, wearing over-the-top outfits, sleeping around, and raking in cash hand over fist through an organized racket of horse thievery and stagecoach robbery. During her sixteen-year career as an outlaw, Bass Reeves was the only lawman to ever successfully apprehend her.
Despite the fact that he spent much of his life drilling folks in the head with bullets, Reeves’s service record was utterly stainless. He killed fourteen men in gunfights—more than Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Billy the Kid, and Wild Bill Hickok—and wounded dozens more, but was never once convicted of unlawful use of force, murder, police brutality, or any of that stupid crap. He couldn’t be bribed or paid off, and was so devoted to administering justice that one time he even hunted down and arrested his own son when the kid murdered Bass’s daughter-in-law. Unbelievably, Bass Reeves was also apparently more bulletproof than a Steven Seagal movie, seeing as how he was never wounded once during his time on the force. He had his belt shot in two, his hat brim shot away, a button on his coat shot off, and his bridle reins cut in half by bullets, but never felt the sting of a gunshot to any part of his body.
Bass Reeves served valiantly for three decades, and when his branch of the marshals was disbanded in 1907, the seventy-year-old lawman took a job as a police officer with the Muskogee Police Department, walking the beat with a cane and a revolver. He retired two years later and died in 1910, one of the most badass and obscure heroes of the American West and a man whose story is so over-the-top awesome that it pretty much generates its own gravitational field.
BADASS REVOLVERS
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Bass Reeves was known to carry a couple of well-worn Colt Model 1873 Army revolvers (A) on him at all times. The famous “gun that won the West,” this .45-caliber single-action cartridge revolver was the most popular weapon among cowboys, cavalrymen, outlaws, gunfight
ers, and lawmen of the American frontier. Its nickname, “Peacemaker,” should be a good indication that it wasn’t a weapon to be screwed around with. Here are some other revolvers you should be aware of.
COLT 1851 NAVY (B)
This six-round, cap-and-ball .36-caliber pistol was popular among officers and cavalrymen on both sides of the American Civil War of Northern Aggression Between the States, and was also the preferred sidearm of the legendary gunfighter Wild Bill Hickok, Confederate general Robert E. Lee, and globe-trotting British adventurer Sir Richard Francis Burton. This durable and reliable weapon remained popular well after the war, and many Western cowboys later had their trusty revolvers converted to accept cartridge rounds.
LE MAT (C)
The Le Mat was a ridiculously sweet nine-shot cap-and-ball revolver with a short, 16-gauge shotgun barrel mounted just below the main firing chamber. In the hands of guys like the swashbuckling Civil War cavalry commander J. E. B. Stuart, this weapon—half pistol, half sawn-off shotgun—was utterly devastating at close range.
SMITH AND WESSON MODEL 29 (D)
The original .44 Magnum, this urination-inducing double-action weapon has been making punks feel unlucky for decades. Popularized by the immortal Dirty Harry Callahan, who characterized it in no uncertain terms as “the most powerful gun in the world,” this gun is as intimidating as a Viking helmet and can punch a quarter-sized hole in anything you point it at. And seriously, if it’s good enough for Clint Eastwood, it’s good enough for everyone.
BUNTLINE SPECIAL (E)
Wild West legend has it that Wyatt Earp used to pistol-whip the hell out of varmints, rustlers, and hoodlums with a custom-made Peacemaker with a twelve-inch-long barrel. This massive weapon, known as the Buntline Special, had an attachable walnut wood shoulder stock, giving it the accuracy and range of a rifle while retaining the badassitude of a .45-caliber revolver.
SMITH AND WESSON MODEL 500 (F)
The largest revolver out there today, this beast is fifteen inches long and weighs six pounds when empty, so when you inevitably run out of bullets you can easily just bludgeon any surviving bad guys to death with it. It holds five of the biggest bullets ever created for a pistol, the behemoth Smith and Wesson .500 Magnum round, which is about the size of a AA battery and has the stopping power of a Civil War–era smoothbore cannon. Merely pointing this weapon at someone is enough to cause incontinence. Sure, actually shooting it might break your wrist, but at least you can rest assured that this weapon compensates not only for your own penis but also for every single penis in the tristate area.
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NIKOLA TESLA
(1856–1943)
By scientific application we can project destructive energy in thread-like beams as far as a telescope can discern an object. The range of the beams is only limited by the curvature of the earth. Should you launch an attack in an area covered by these beams, should you, say, send in 10,000 planes or an army of a million, the planes would be brought down instantly and the army destroyed.
PRETTY MUCH EVERYBODY EVEN REMOTELY ASSOCIATED WITH STRATEGY VIDEO GAMES HAS HEARD THE NAME TESLA—THE SERBIAN GOD OF LIGHTNING’S OMNIPRESENT, EVER-ZAPPING COILS HAVE BEEN RUINING THE LIVES OF DIGITAL SOLDIERS AND GIBBING U.S. WAR MACHINES INTO SPARE PARTS SINCE THE RELEASE OF COMMAND AND CONQUER: RED ALERT IN 1996—BUT SURPRISINGLY FEW PEOPLE THESE DAYS ARE FAMILIAR WITH THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ONE OF HUMANKIND’S MOST ECCENTRIC, BADASS, AND VOLUMETRICALLY INSANE SCIENTIFIC SUPERFREAKS.
First off, Nikola Tesla was brilliant. And not just like Ken Jennings trivia master brilliant, either—I mean like “Holy jeebus, my head just exploded from all the awesome” brilliant. The Croatian-born engineer spoke eight languages, almost single-handedly developed technology that harnessed the power of electricity for household use, and invented things like electrical generators, FM radio, remote control, robots, spark plugs, fluorescent lights, and giant-ass machines that shoot enormous, brain-frying lightning bolts all over the place. He had an unyielding, steel-trap photographic memory and an innate ability to visualize even the most complex pieces of machinery—the guy did advanced calculus and physics equations in his freaking head, memorized entire books at a time, and successfully pulled off scientific experiments that modern-day technology still can’t replicate. For instance, in 2007 a group of lesser geniuses at MIT got all pumped up out of their minds because they wirelessly transmitted energy a distance of seven feet through the air. Nikola Tesla once lit two hundred lightbulbs from a power source twenty-six miles away, and he did it in 1899 with a machine he built from spare parts in the middle of a godforsaken wasteland of a mountain range. To this day, nobody can really figure out how the hell he pulled that crap off, because two-thirds of the schematics existed only in the darkest recesses of Tesla’s all-powerful brain.
Of course, much like many other eccentric giga-geniuses and diabolical masterminds, Tesla was also completely insane. He was prone to nervous breakdowns, claimed to receive weird visions in the middle of the night, spoke to pigeons, and occasionally thought he was receiving electromagnetic signals from extraterrestrials on Mars. He was also obsessive-compulsive and hated round objects, human hair, jewelry, and anything that wasn’t divisible by three. He slept just two to three hours per night and remained celibate for his entire life. Basically, Nikola Tesla was the ultimate mad scientist, which is seriously rad.
Another sweet thing about Tesla is that he conducted the sort of crazy experiments that generally result in hordes of angry villages breaking down the door to your lab with torches and pitchforks. One time, while he was working on magnetic resonance, he discovered the resonant frequency of the earth and caused an earthquake so powerful that it almost obliterated the building on Fifth Avenue in New York that housed his Frankenstein castle of a laboratory. Stuff was flying off the walls, the drywall was breaking apart, the cops were coming after him, and Tesla had to smash his device with a sledgehammer to keep it from demolishing an entire city block. Later, he boasted that he could have built a device powerful enough to split the earth in two. Nobody dared him to prove it.
Tesla also ordered the construction of the Wardenclyffe Tower or Tesla Tower, a giant building shaped like an erect penis to house the largest Tesla coil ever built. The massive structure, ostensibly designed to wirelessly transmit power, has been cited as a potential cause of the mysterious 1908 Tunguska event—a ten-megaton blast that detonated in the wastelands above central Russia, completely deforested everything unlucky enough to be located within 830 square miles of the blast site, and left an eerie glow that could be seen in the skies above Europe for several days. While nothing has ever successfully proven Tesla’s involvement in the ass-destroyingly huge explosion, it’s pretty awesome that this guy could potentially have detonated a weapon a thousand times more powerful than the nuclear bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, and have done it back before they’d even invented the submachine gun.
During his adventures blinding half of the world with science, Nikola Tesla harnessed the power of Niagara Falls into the first hydroelectric power plant, constructed a bath designed to cleanse the human body of germs using nothing but electricity, and created a 130-foot-long bolt of lightning from one of his massive coils (a feat that to this day remains the world record for man-made lightning), but perhaps his most badass invention was his face-melting, tank-destroying, supersecret atomic death ray. In the 1920s he claimed to be working on a tower that could potentially have spewed forth a gigantic beam of ionized particles capable of disintegrating aircraft from two hundred miles away and blinking most people out of existence like something out of a Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers comic. His weapon, known as the teleforce beam, allegedly shot ball lightning at sixty million volts, liquefying its targets with enough voltage to vaporize steel, and while it could shoot farther than two hundred miles, its effectiveness beyond that range was limited by the curvature of the earth. Luckily for all humans, this crazy crap never came to fruition—most of the schematics
and plans existed only in Tesla’s head, and when he died of heart failure in 1943, little hard data on the project existed. Still, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI confiscated all his personal effects and locked them away anyway, just to be safe.
Despite being incredibly popular during his day, now Tesla remains largely overlooked among lists of the greatest inventors and scientists of all time. Thomas Edison gets all the glory for discovering the light-bulb, but it was his onetime assistant and lifelong archnemesis, Nikola Tesla, who made the breakthroughs in alternating-current technology that allowed people to use electricity to cheaply power appliances and lighting in their homes. They constantly fought about whether to use alternating or direct current (their bitter blood feud resulted in both men being snubbed by the Nobel Prize committee), but ultimately Tesla was the one who delivered the fatal kick to the crotch that ended the battle: at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, his AC generators illuminated the entire experience, marking the first time that an event of that magnitude had ever taken place under the glow of artificial light. He also demonstrated how safe AC power was by running two hundred thousand volts of electricity through his own body just to be awesome. Today, all homes and appliances run on Tesla’s AC current.
Nikola Tesla was an incredible supergenius whose intellect placed him dangerously on the precipice between great scientific mind and utter madness. He held seven hundred patents at the time of his death, made groundbreaking discoveries in the fields of physics, robotics, steam turbine engineering, and magnetism, and once melted one of his assistants’ hands by overloading it with X-rays—which isn’t really scientific but is still pretty cool. And honestly, if there was one man on this planet who was ever capable of single-handedly destroying the earth through his insane scientific discoveries, it was Tesla. That alone should qualify him as a pretty righteous badass.