The Secrets
of Wiley Bill

The new Franklin County jail stood north of the public square like a promise the county had made to itself. It was solid. It was strong. Sheriff Joe Templeton was proud of it. He had filled it quickly — a set of bad characters had overrun this part of Texas and the adjoining counties, and Templeton had made it his business to put as many of them behind its walls as he could.

On the evening of April 5, it was nearly dusk when the men broke for supper. Templeton thought it too early to expect trouble. He was wrong.

Before he left, he asked a young man named Robert Morgan to keep watch. Morgan was barely twenty four years old, a friendly face around town, not yet a lawman in any official sense. Templeton handed him a shotgun and a six shooter, deputized him on the spot, and walked south across the square toward his supper.

Morgan sat down on the steps near the stairway leading to the upper story of the jail and settled in for what he imagined would be a quiet evening. He had been sitting there approximately ten minutes when the world came apart.

Two men riding out of town spotted them first — six or seven riders coming hard for the jail, Sam Wilson among them, along with Ed Murphy, Bill Bird, and others known only as John Red and Buffalo Bill. They wheeled their horses and raced back to sound the alarm, but by then the shooting had already begun.

Bill Bird came in low and quiet, slipping under cover to the side of the jail. He raised his weapon and fired once. Robert Morgan went down where he sat, shot and dying on the steps where Templeton had left him just minutes before. Morgan managed to fire back before the life went out of him — one shot that grazed Bird's scalp, close enough to part his hair. It was the last thing Robert Morgan ever did.

Riding with those men that night, somewhere in the darkness and the gunsmoke and the thunder of hooves, was a red haired young man from Texas named William Martin Wiley.

Robert Morgan was carried to Rutherford's drug store, where he died within twenty minutes. He had been a lawman for approximately ten minutes. To this day, it is believed he holds the record for the shortest law enforcement career in American history.

And one — the red haired one — would ride all the way to Arkansas and disappear.

He called himself Mack Allen. The name came from his uncle — a man named Allen who had raised him when his own father could not. He found work on a farmer's land. He kept to himself. He worked hard. He said little. At night, when the farmer's house had gone dark and quiet, Bill Wiley knelt beside his bedroll and prayed.

He prayed for forgiveness. He mentioned Mount Vernon. He mentioned the things he had done there. He did not know that the farmer, lying awake in the darkness, could hear every word.

The farmer sent word to Sheriff Templeton the next morning. They came for him and took him back to Texas — to the same jail he had ridden on less than a year before.

He did not stay long.

Together with two other prisoners — Sam Kelton and Joe Hollis — Bill Wiley pulled a jailer into their cell, armed themselves in the guard room, and walked out into the streets of Mount Vernon. But Bill Wiley was already gone — riding north again, back to Arkansas, deeper into the hills, closer to the rivers. This time for good.

He built a nine room house — no small thing in those hills. He put up a bunkhouse, a barn and corral, a blacksmith shop. He found a spring on the property that people would later call Inspiration Spring.

For twenty years, Bill Wiley lived quietly. He mined silver and manganese. He farmed. He prospected. He was known as a friendly, inoffensive man. Wanted in Texas for the murder of a ten minute deputy, he built a life so ordinary that no one thought to look twice at him.

Until 1900. Until everything fell apart at once.

Mattie died on October 17, 1900. She was thirty nine years old. The following spring, trouble came riding in from five miles east. His name was Bine Whitlatch — thirty seven years old, a married man with children, owner of one hundred sixty acres of good Arkansas land. Bine Whitlatch had taken notice of Florence Wiley. She was fourteen years old.

What followed was a campaign of terror. Whitlatch drew a pistol on her, hid around the house watching, told her if she did not go with him by April fourth he would shoot her. On March 27, 1901, Florence went to the Justice of the Peace and made a formal complaint. She was fourteen years old and brave enough to say his name.

Whitlatch was arrested. The case was dismissed. He walked free.

Eleven days later, Florence Wiley was dead.

It was a Monday. Bill Wiley and his two sons were working in the field. Florence was at the spring, thirty steps from the house, washing clothes. Her sister was outside milking.

A man appeared.

He chased Florence into the house. He followed her to her room. He raised a Winchester rifle and fired once. The ball entered just below her heart and came out just below her left shoulder blade.

Her sister ran to find her father. Bill had come home by a different route and arrived not knowing anything was wrong until his youngest child met him at the gate with the news. He went immediately to Florence's side.

She looked up at her father and said — Daddy, Bine shot me. And he'll shoot you if you step outside.

Those were among the last words Florence Wiley spoke. She died that afternoon, fourteen years old, shot through the chest with a Winchester rifle.

Who pulled that trigger? That is the question that has never been answered.

Bine Whitlatch was arrested, put through habeas corpus proceedings, and bound over to the grand jury. He was never tried. The case died quietly. Eventually he moved to Klamath Falls, Oregon, and lived out the rest of his days without ever answering for what happened at the spring near Wiley Bluff.

Two months after Florence died, two men rode into Polk County from Texas. One was E.P. Templeton, Sheriff of Franklin County — younger brother of the original Sheriff Joe Templeton, who had deputized Robert Morgan twenty two years before. E.P. had been nine years old when it happened. Now he was the sheriff. Now he was here. The other was C.C. Dupre, an old ex-sheriff who had been chasing this particular ghost for a long time.

Bill Wiley went with them without argument. No requisition papers were required.

Was he tired of running? Was he confident he could beat it? Was he a man who had already lost everything that mattered and simply didn't care anymore? They held him in the Franklin County jail. Many thought him to be Mack Allen. Twenty two years had passed. The evidence was not enough.

Bill Wiley was released. He went home to Arkansas.

He married again — Julia Oretta Ward, eighteen years old, in November of 1902. He was approximately fifty four. They had children in the house near Wiley Bluff. Julia left him sometime between 1910 and 1920. She packed up the children and went to Brady, Texas — of all the places on earth, Texas — and never returned.

By 1920 he was living alone. The mining operation had wound down. The bunkhouse stood empty. Florence was in the ground. Mattie was in the ground. The men he had ridden with in 1879 were dead or scattered.

Just Bill. And the spring. And the hills.

He died on April 5, 1930, at Board Camp in Polk County, Arkansas — about twenty five miles north of the Cossatot River homestead where he had spent his life. The cause of death was listed as dropsy. The doctor noted his birth year as unknown. Even his age was a mystery. With Bill Wiley, it was sometimes hard to tell the difference between a mystery and a lie.

Florence was already in the ground near Wiley Bluff, fourteen years old forever. On her gravestone, the family carved their verdict — the verdict the law could never deliver:

Whatever secrets of life he possessed, they went with him.

These are actual photographs of the real William Martin Wiley — Wiley Bill himself. The man in these images lived every event described in this story. He rode on that jail in 1879. He knelt in that Arkansas farmhouse and prayed loud enough for a stranger to hear. He stood on that porch and watched the Texas lawmen ride up. He buried his daughter near the spring.

The photographs have been colorized from the originals. The red hair is real.