LONG QUEST FOR REVENGE
The Reverend George Honey, pastor of the Methodist Church in Sterling, Kan., was returning from market the morning of Sept. 18, 1876, when he saw a man staggering up the street into town. “He was a horrible sight,” Honey noted. “His head and face were covered with blood, with large patches here and there caused by coagulation. His clothes were in a disorderly condition, begrimed with dirt and dust and colored at places with the blood dripping from wounds in his neck and face.”
Honey rushed the man to a local doctor, who determined he’d been shot twice—in the back of the head, the ball having lodged in his neck, and through the upper lip, that ball coming to rest in a cheekbone. The wounded man identified himself as Eli Patten. According to the Rice County Gazette, he claimed that two deputized men, A.C. “Charlie” Myers and Frank West, had been transporting him and a young man named Archibald Douglass from the jail at Wichita to Great Bend. Patten alleged he and Douglass had been “lying in the wagon, chained together with shackles on their feet, when…Myers rode up behind and shot him [Patten] in the back of the head, taking off a finger from his right hand, which he had under his head.” He claimed the deputy then shot Douglass, despite the latter’s pleas for his life. Myers and West, Patten continued, then unshackled their wards, threw them to the ground and shot each of them again before stripping them to their underclothes and concealing their bodies in the bushes. Once the deputies had driven off, Patten managed to crawl to a nearby river, then found his way to a house and begged a lift to the outskirts of Sterling.
