Step back into the rugged days of the American Old West, where towns often carved out their existence on the edge of chaos. In 1874, the remote mining settlement of Yankee Hill, Colorado, was a place held captive by a ruthless outlaw named Barney Casewood. Fear shadowed every street until an unexpected stranger rode in, a man on horseback with a quiet determination and a mission for justice. This was Willie Kennard, a figure who would defy expectations and make history as Colorado’s first Black lawman, ready to face down the terror that gripped the town.
Kennard wasn’t just any drifter; he was a battle-hardened veteran, a corporal who had served in the Ninth Cavalry and faced fierce challenges on the frontier. Arriving in Yankee Hill, he boldly applied for the marshal’s badge, offered a challenge no one expected him to survive: bring Casewood to justice. What followed was a dramatic showdown that etched Willie Kennard’s name into the annals of Colorado history. His courageous actions didn’t just bring peace to a troubled town; they forged a powerful legacy, proving that true courage knows no color and establishing him as an unsung pioneer of law and order in the American West.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
Speaker 1: And we return to Our American Stories. And up next, a story about the first Black lawman in Colorado, Willie Kennard. Here to tell the story is our regular contributor, Richard Munez. Take it away, Rich.
00:00:29
Speaker 2: The man on horseback paused about a mile from the town. Like so many Old West communities, the town was made of logs, roughly sawn boards, and they all together with dreams. He studied the community for a moment before urging the horse toward it. He didn’t look like much. He was just a rangy, middle-aged cowhand, like so many cowhands across the West. But if you studied him, you knew those things about him: his guns low. This was the side of a man accustomed to fighting for his life. People looked at him with shock as he came into the town. Now, this was a novelty. Someone wondered what he was doing here. After all, there was a review of his kind around. Maybe he was lost. But the miners in the town of Yankee Hill, Colorado, were certainly one thing: this man was trouble. Why else would a Black man be riding into their town? The year was 1874. The mining town, called Yankee Hill, Colorado, was high in the mountains, and it happened to be the personal playground of a man named Barney Casewood. Now Barney had bullied and terrorized the town for over two years. He had killed men, killed a marshal or two, scared off a few more, and raped a fifteen-year-old girl named Bertie Campbell. When Bertie’s father confronted him, Casewood gunned him down, left him dead in the street. The town marshal, a man named Craig, tried to arrest him. Casewood laid him out right next to Bertie’s father, being bled from nearby. Ruby Hill replaced Craig; he didn’t do any better. The next marshal left town after seeing Casewood kill two saddle tramps. Like the giant Goliath in the Bible, men feared that no one could match him. No one challenged him. This was his, and no one and nothing would take it away from him. What this particular Goliath hadn’t counted on was that David’s having an annoying tendency to just show up. In his case, David had just ridden into town. Matt Gordon owned the Square Deal General Store. He was also the mayor of Yankee Hill, and there were a couple of the city councilmen discussing town business in Fanny Sarah Palmer’s Cafe over coffee when the Black cowboy walked in. He went straight over to them and said, “My name is Willie Kennard. I hear your town’s looking for a marshal. I’d like to apply for the job.” Gordon would say years later, he wasn’t impressed. One of the councilmen looked up at Kennard and asked, “You can read, boy?” But if the comment irritated Willie, he didn’t show it. Gordon decided he’d have some fun with the applicant. He said, “The hiring process is pretty steep. We have to make sure you can handle the job.” “Oh, and what is that?” “There’s a man in the bar across the street. He’d already killed several men, including two former marshals. Arrest him, and the job is yours!” They handed him the marshal badge, fairly sure they’d be getting it back soon. With a nod, the newly minted marshal started walking across the street.
Now, if they’d expected Willie to run or just to die, they grossly underestimated him. Willie was a battle-hardened warrior. He fought as a corporal with the Seventh Illinois Rifle Company. He had also served with the Ninth Cavalry, an entirely Black unit, those at Fort Bliss, Texas. He later moved out to Fort Davis, Arizona. There he fought against the Apaches. Being a corporal made him a leader of men. His time in the unit soon convinced others. He knew his way around a firearm and became an instructor at the Montrose training camp. But when the war was over, and like so many others, Willie looked around and found few opportunities for a man of his talents. So he drifted to Denver, and one day he read about this town and its marshal.
Now, with minutes behind the badge, he walked into the saloon. He saw Casewood and spent a minute studying him, knowing how he also wore his pistols low, and he studied the man’s two associates. Soon he approached the table and informed Casewood that he was under arrest. Well, Casewood and his friends thought that was probably the funniest thing they’d ever heard. “I’m supposed to just come with you?” Casewood asked, “Where are we going?” “It’s your choice,” Willie answered. “You can go to jail or you can go to hell.” Well, now Casewood was in a pickle, and he had exactly two choices: surrender or add to his list of killings. Option one didn’t appeal to him. Option two was easy. He stood, intending to add to his list, and tried to reach for his pistols. What happened next is debated. Some say before he even touched the guns, Willie had drawn and fired twice. They said the bullets struck the pistols, nearly ripping them from the gun belt and rendered both weapons useless. Others say that Willie drew and clubbed Casewood hard across the side of the head with the drawn pistol. Unlike the Glocks and weapons favored today, the Old West pistol was American heavy metal at its very best. While the story’s just pure, what happened to Casewood, no one disputes what happened there: Casewood’s buddies both tried to draw on the new marshal, and before they even got halfway out, he had taken them both out with a bullet between the eyes. Casewood then went to jail. Justice was very swift back then. Casewood was tried for the rape of the Campbell girl, the murders of the marshals and the townspeople, and he was taken to the edge of town to a pine tree and hung. Stories have it that he wrapped his legs on the tree in an effort to keep from dying. But all it did was prolong his agonies. It was a fitting end for the brutal man, and the town of Yankee Hill had a new marshal. Willie was paid $100 a month, which is a little bit shy of $2,300 in today’s money.
Now he did get tested again. There was a robber named Billy McGeorge, an escapee from the Colorado Territorial Prison. He formed a gang around himself, and they preyed on the freight wagons and the stages that ran around the Gold Trail. The town council asked Marshal Kennard to track him down. Well, Kennard realized this wasn’t such a great idea. Colorado is huge, Colorado is rugged, and he could chase these guys all over the territory until doomsday and still never catch them. “I’m going to make them come to me,” he said. Soon, wanted posters started showing up on trees and posts. The marshal had put a bounty on McGeorge’s head of a measly $50. Now this ticked McGeorge off quite a bit. Every other marshal around was asking at least three hundred of fifty bucks. That almost wasn’t worth walking across the street. So what he decided to do was go to Yankee Hill. He and his gang were going to explain the facts of life to this Black man who had insulted him so well. Well, they got to Yankee Hill, and Marshal Kennard was waiting for them. He was armed with a double-barrel shotgun. “You men can just drop your weapons,” Kennard ordered, leveling the shotgun at them. One of them, an outlaw named Cash Downing, tried to pull on Willie. Willie blew him off the horse with a blast from the shotgun. The blast also killed the outlaw right next to Downing and blew the window out of the general store. With one barrel still loaded and aimed directly at them, McGeorge felt his men surrender. But as Kennard took them to jail, they breathed out threats of vengeance. They never got the chance. They soon found themselves dangling from the same tree that Casewood had died on a few months before.
By 1877, Yankee Hill was a quiet town, but it was also a dying town. The gold in the area had run out, and people were just moving on. Willie looked around, realized it was going to be a ghost town soon. He handed in his badge and said, “I’m going out East. I’m gonna find myself a wife.” Then Willie vanished from history forever. Where he went, when he died, and where he’s buried is unknown for the time being. And like so many Old West heroes, Willie Kennard rode into history, leaving a lasting legacy as Colorado’s first Black lawman.
00:08:23
Speaker 1: And a special thanks to Monty for doing the production on that piece, and to Richard Munez for his terrific storytelling. And by the way, this was a real-life bad guy terrorizing a town and needed a real-life tough good guy to save it, and he did. And my goodness, the stories of towns! Well, he told a few, and we’ll be telling a lot more. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. We’ll listen to one hundred affiliates all over this great country, and we love hearing your stories. Send us heroes in your town, whether it’s cops, first responders, or, well, heroic stories going way back to the early days in your town. Willie Kennard, Colorado’s first Black lawman. Here on Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we tell stories of history, faith, business, love, loss, and your stories. Send us your story, small or large, to our email, oas@OurAmericanStories.com. That’s oas@OurAmericanStories.com. We’d love to hear them and put them on the air. Our audience loves them too.
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