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Character's Name: |
Joe Tucker (email) |
Pictures of Joe are the late actor Pete Duel as Hannibal Heyes from the TV show Music for Joe's profile page is Wonderfull Land by The Shadows: (doesn't work in some browsers)
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Type of Character: |
Gunfighter |
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Gender: |
Male |
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Race: |
White |
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Age: |
29 |
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Kills: |
13 In Character Background ...
In Gameplay ...
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Physical Description:
Joe is 5'10, trim and upper-body-muscled but not overly stocky or heavy. He has matching bullethole scars on front & back of his left shoulder, which gets stiff in the cold or wet weather. His skin is naturally rather pale except where the sun gets him all the time, which is his face and throat and forearms. He has sandy hair and a gruff three-day stubble. He wears good brown canvas pants and practical brown leather boots, usually a linen shirt, white if he can get one, the sleeves always rolled up over the elbow, and a good black hat to keep his head warm in winter and the sun out of his eyes in the daytime. He has a single gunbelt with the holster tied to his left leg (he is a right-handed cross-draw, which is unusual). When it's cold he'll find a range coat or sometimes a sarape or even a plain old mule blanket will do. He carries a pack with spare shirt, a bedrool, a canteen, some bullets and Indian-beef and a Bible and various things such as a knife or two, needle & thread, or tinderbox.
Weaknesses:
Joe is a wanderer, but to a large degree he has fallen into the classic "gunslinger" lifestyle. It is an addiction and a curse. It sucks him in and holds him, from the sheer thrill of it, the heart-exploding high of adrenalin and danger ... and facing into the eye of the Reaper, and cheating Him. But the cost is dread and fear, most every waking moment, and the moments of sleep are coming fewer and further between. Any gunslinger, to promote his reputation, has to challenge those above him, which means Joe must fight and win against shooters who are "better" than he is. It also means that he's under continual challenge from weaker gunslingers hoping to catch him at a bad moment and use his dead body as a rung on the ladder up the gunslinger rolls of reputation. He has thought many times of quitting, but two things hold him back: first, that he can't imagine a life without this excitement; the drudgery of "normal" mundane existence would kill him from boredom -- and second, that he often sees himself as a White Hat (despite the actual color of his real hat), ridding the West of those villainous gunslingers who rob, rape, and murder outside any sense of morality; it's the good fight that he cannot give up.
Strengths:
Joe is fast and accurate with a six-shooter -- he is the classic gunslinger, and though some people and societies revile men of the gun, some people (especially young boys) and societies put gunslingers on pedestals ... well, the "decent" gunslingers, anyway. Joe is handsome, with a friendly smile and a charismatic twinkle in his eye, meaning most people take a liking to him right off. He's polite and deferential, he's got no temper, and he respects men in their place and women in theirs. He has no fear of living outdoors under the stars, and to camp in the country comes easy, especially after his days in the basements and alleys of Wichita (see Background). He is a moderately good poker player and a very good shooting-game player. He is not too proud to muck out a stables or take handyman work when those are the only jobs to be had. Joe can still make a living doing trick shots like "throwing up three" bottles and shooting them out of the air, or challenging locals (who think they can shoot) to a "first miss loses" contest to put slugs into a tree at twenty paces, forty, sixty, eighty ... he will usually play for a meal and a bottle of whiskey, and he almost always wins.
Gear/Weapons:
Joe has only one pistol: Blackie, a .42 caliber LeMat revolver, smoothbore, a very strange double-barreled weapon, which some call a "scatterpistol." He took this gun from his 1st kill (see below). Its steel is very dark, hence the nickname.
Background / History:
Year | Age |
Events & Gunfight Details
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1841 | 0 |
Joe Tucker was born on a blizzardy New Years Day and grew up on a farm outside of Wichita. His daddy used to take him hunting so he learned rifles early. He never much liked taking down animals but he loved target shooting, and cartridges being more expensive for his daddy's hunting rifles than for a little .22 pistol, Joe got a .22 for his 11th birthday and practiced shooting cans and bottles until he could hit 9 of 10 at a hundred paces on the quickdraw. |
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1856 | Age 15 |
One night he heard a commotion in the downstairs of the family farmhouse and ran down to find his father murdered and his mother with the kitchen varmintgun (a one-aught shotgun) standing over the corpse of an escaped convict who had tried to rob them, and who had killed Joe's daddy when it all went sour but who had got his own back anyway from the lady of the house. Three days later, after the funeral, his grieving mother said what stuck in Joe's head forever: "Animals like that deserve to be shot dead." She was proud of what she had done and Joe felt the same way. The farm got foreclosed and Joe's mother moved back east, a broken woman whom Joe could not bear to see cry; Joe went to Wichita for a while to begin his adulthood. In Wichita, Joe learned to play poker and shoot targets for extra money. It was a wild time of youth and sex and whiskey and freedom and no responsibilities, though the first winter was tough when he had no real home, but he was never hungry. |
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1858 | Age 17 |
• Kill #1 - Bad Dan Cumacker - July
One day in Wichita when Joe was 17 he made the wrong bet with the wrong man and he wound up in a shootout. He took a slug in his left shoulder, then put a slug in the other guy's heart, and while the man stood there staring at Joe who had killed him, that man shot again and hit square onto Joe's pistol of that time, ruining the barrel. Joe took the dead man's own pistol, the LeMat; his friends told him he better skedaddle before the law came around, and Joe began to move west as a drifter. The man he had killed, through pure luck because the other man had been drinking, which is how the fellow came to be so ornery on that occasion but a poor shot (though both his bullets hit), was none other than Bad Dan Cumacker. And now Joe was the man who had killed Dan Cumacker. |
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1859 | Age 18 |
• Kill #2 - Charles "Chag" McIvers - April
As Joe moved west from Wichita, one of his first stops was to work on the Red Sky ranch owned (mostly absentee) by Pappa Shawn McIvers. Joe was one of twenty hands working the ranch, managed by Katlin McIvers. Katlin's daughter Lissa Beth was an incorrigible tramp and tried to get Joe and several others behind the barn. As it turned out, she got herself pregnant. She knew it was not Joe's child, she was a might too young for him to touch (and anyway he wanted to keep his job), it could have been any of half a dozen other men on the ranch, but Joe was her favorite maybe because she most wanted what she could not get, and so when pressed to say who the daddy was she said Joe because she thought Katlin would shotgun a marriage. Instead the McIvers boys came after Joe with a lynchin' rope; Joe managed to escape but in the process he killed Chag McIvers. The next two boys, Tag and Terry, vowed revenge. |
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• Kill #3 - Buddy Spencer - September 10
Joe had got all the way to Denver and was making a decent living in the poker halls. A young East-coast dandy named Buddy Spencer used to haunt the various card halls, usually being a loud-mouth drunk and harrassing the girls and spoiling for fights. One day Joe had had enough and said under his breath, "Somebody oughtta gun that dog down in the street," and some of Joe's companions at the time took up the cry, a bit loudly as they had all been drinking, and they raised up Joe's reputation as the killer of Bad Dan Cumacker who was infamous in any cardhouse. Buddy overheard it and pressed Joe to repeat it to his face, which Joe did, and they went out in the street and quickdrew at fifty paces and Joe caught Buddy in the left eye before Buddy even could properly swing up his gun. So overnight in Denver the name Joe Tucker spread fast and led directly to his next shootout. |
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• Kill #4 - Caroline Twist - September 11
Joe had the law on his heels over the Buddy Spencer incident and he felt it was about time to skedaddle when all of a sudden the most unexpected thing occurred. As he was walking up the street he heard his name yelled; he turned to see a woman twenty paces back who was wearing swear to God a frilly pink dress like from a dance hall but also a shiny black gunbelt with two Colt revolvers. She was a fine-looking filly and Joe while instinctively getting a good eyeful was too surprised at the turn of events to catch what she was saying; she was cursing up a storm and calling Joe a "braggart" and a "caveman barbarian" and a "gunslinging outlaw who would taste his own medicine" and a "woman-hater" (this last bit, which put Joe even more off-guard from sheer surprise, as he had nothing against woman in any way whatsoever) and before he knew it she drew both guns and fired. She missed both shots and Joe dodged sideways to a brick wall, which was where Caroline's third shot hit, chipping the brick, meanwhile the entire crowd laughing like mad as Joe ran from being shot at by a woman, and Caroline got off two more shots and Joe had nowhere to run and he drew and shot her straight in the heart. There was a huge hush in the street and Joe took only a couple of seconds to decide for sure that it was time to get out of Denver and probably the whole state of Colorado. He made a quick escape. To this very day, sometimes he still has nightmares of a woman in a pink dress with two big black guns and a haze of smoke all around her. She is laughing cruelly and cursing up a storm. Only a month after the fact did he learn her name. |
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1860 | Age 19 |
• Kill #5 - A.J. Rieman - August 1
Joe had been working as a cowboy outside of Santa Fe from ranch to ranch. One particular night he had occasion to go up to the master's house to carry a message from the trail boss, and upon arriving at the house he found the whole family laid out and butchered in the parlor, with the fat old household cook, naked, hovering over the bodies with bloody knives and covered in their blood. The man ran at Joe, and Joe barely escaped getting cut up; he was chased all the way across the ranch by the knife-wielding madman; luckily he got to his gun and shot the man dead (this is the origin of his rule never to leave his gun out of reach). The trail boss and the Sheriff easily saw Joe's innocence, but the ranch shut down during the period of probate and Joe had to move on. The episode was a trauma for Joe but oddly not as much as the event against Caroline Twist, maybe because Joe could not relate in any way to the lunatic with the knives, but Caroline had worn that gunbelt and he knew how it must have felt on her hip, know how the gun felt in her hand when it spat a bullet, knew how it felt to shoot at another living human being who can shoot back. |
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1st duel with Terry McIvers - August 12. The Rieman story, with Joe's name, made the newspaper "Santa Fe New Mexican." Terry McIvers just so happened to be in Santa Fe then (Tag McIvers was in Amarillo) and this was Terry's big break in hunting Joe. He tracked Joe to the train station and opened fire, instead killing a woman who happened to walk in the wrong place at the wrong time. Thus began a shootout between Joe and Terry, which moved from the train station across the street to a hotel, where Terry shot two more innocent bystanders; the fight then got around the hotel and across another street to a bank, where the responding Law intercepted (but didn't capture) Terry, and Joe lost track of what happened to Terry after that. Joe managed to catch a ride on a stagecoach and so Terry lost track of Joe for the time being. Terry cabled to Tag and called him out to Santa Fe to join the hunt. The two brothers were told that Joe had ridden out north, and they chased after him. In fact, Joe had gone south. |
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1861 | Age 23 |
-- CIVIL WAR BEGINS -- |
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• Kill #6 - Edward Ikerssen, Jr.
Duel with Ilga Ikerssen. |
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1863 | Age 23 |
• Kill #7 - Kerry Lister - June 12 Joe was in Salt Lake City and feeling quite disillusioned and disconnected with reality after the affair with Ilga. One day when a shootout occurred in the main street, between the infamous gunslinger Kerry Lister and a young cocksure kid known only as Bobby (whom Kerry Lister shot dead with a single bullet at 100 paces, Bobby not even having drawn his gun), Joe felt his head humming as if a bee had got in his skull and was buzzing around. He stepped out of the crowd and into the street and began shouting at Kerry Lister, "Hey! You think you can draw? You think you can shoot? You try a quickdraw on me, now!" and while Joe stood beside the body of the young Bobby the two men drew on each other. Joe had seen something Kerry did when he shot Bobby: Kerry spun on his right heel, swung his left leg back and gave a side-on profile, a smaller target than normal, not to mention a bit to the side of where the other fellow would expect Kerry to be. Joe had never seen that before and neither had Kerry Lister ever seen anybody else do it. Joe did it then, not even conscious of doing it: he swung his left leg back, pivoting on his right heel. Kerry missed. Joe shot a bit to the left of where Kerry would have been standing, and caught Kerry in the throat. Kerry fell and choked and died pretty quickly. Joe was amazed that he had even been able to crossdraw and aim properly while swinging his left leg back at the same time. He was also amazed at what he did next: he fell to his knees by Bobby (whom Joe didn't know from Adam, and now never would) and shed tears. The kid had been stupid to challenge somebody faster & better than he was. Maybe Joe had been stupid too, or maybe he was more than a little crazy during this period of his life. Joe went on to try to challenge several more men in Salt Lake City but his reputation was fixed for having killed Kerry Lister, not to mention Bad Dan Cumacker five years before, and nobody in Salt Lake would draw on Joe no matter what he said. More than a few times he heard people say to him, "You're drunk, I won't shoot a drunkard," and in point of fact Joe was drinking a lot during this period. He threatened to shoot down anybody who wouldn't draw but they all knew he was lying about that, he wanted to be drawn on, not to gun people down in cold blood. In this period without gunfighting even when wanted gunfighting, Joe's dependence on the adrenalin began to set in, not fully in his conscious mind but nonetheless a strong need as displayed by the effects of the lack of it. Frustrated and not thinking clearly in any way of looking at it, Joe moved north to Ogden. |
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1865 | Age 24 |
-- CIVIL WAR ENDS -- • Kill #8 - Tommy "Tag" McIvers - April On the same day that the Civil War ended at Appomattox, Tag and Terry McIvers caught up to Joe in Ogden, Utah. Joe was walking the streets, drinking from a bottle of whiskey. He tipped it up high to drain it and it exploded in his hand. Shocked, he looked up the street and there was Tag McIvers shooting at him. Terry appeared from out of a saloon, having heard the shot. Joe drew and fired but he was nowhere near sober and he missed, and he knew he was in trouble so he jumped behind a building. Thus began another running duel against McIvers folk. Joe shifted and dodged through some alleys and wound up behind Tag and shot him in the back of the head point blank without a second thought. He didn't know where Terry was, and by the time he had dodged around some more he had begun to get scared, feeling that at any moment Terry might do to Joe what Joe had done to Tag, blow half his head off from behind without even a warning. Joe had never been so scared before, not to mention drunk and unsteady, and so sticking to the shadows he got out of town and eluded Terry McIvers once again, but not forever. |
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After escaping the two McIvers brothers in Ogden, Joe caught a ferry across the Great Salt Lake, and then headed further generally west into Nevada. He had made a quick getaway from Utah and had nothing more than the shirt on his back and his gun, Blackie. He met up with some Shoshone Indians, friendly outcasts from a Snake River tribe led by an elder who called himself Red And White Father. • Kill #9 - Jimmy Ray Grant
But by the winter of 1865, when the Shoshones wanted to move further south, Joe once again went in search of his own race and found a ranch to work on, the Three-Fives ranch owned by Jasper Bollinger, Jr., a large spread but arid with only two hundred head on poor land, worked by a dozen hands. Joe's head was full of love and peace, but of the Indian holy-man sort, and he was not ready for throwing himself back into White civilization, especially considering some of the men on the Three-Fives were ex-Confederacy and had bones to pick with whoever had not worn gray. Push came to shove between Joe and a Tennesse boy named Jimmy Ray Grant. Joe called the man out and shot him dead. There being three other ex-Johnny Rebs on the ranch, none of them brave enough to draw on Joe now, but all of them willing to rat him out to Boss Jasper, Joe was forced to travel on, although at least he had earned a few dollars and got himself a decent bedroll and pack. He decided to head generally south and maybe catch up with Red And White Father, but he never met that group again, to his lingering regret. |
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1868 | Age 27 |
2nd duel with Terry McIvers. (details under construction) |
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1869 | Age 28 |
While travelling again, Joe had a brief affair with another Mormon girl, Jenny Card, outside of the tiny town of Mojave City in the relatively new (1864) State Of Nevada. Jenny was an untamed spirit, or some folk might call her plum crazy: she was discontented with her family, her church, and even the very land they lived in; furthermore she was just now old enough to act up about being discontent rather than just cry like a little girl. Joe was working in a general store south of the town and the Card family had a small struggling farm a mile east. Before Joe knew it, he was involved up to his eyeballs, although he was not complaining because he got some fine treatment from this girl and tried to give back the same as he was getting. She made it plain she had no plans ever to marry or get tied to a family or even to hang around this "God-forsaken desert" for much longer. That was alright with Joe, for a while, about a month. But Just as she started to grow on him, she disappeared, no note, no word to anybody. A deputy sheriff came around asking questions of Joe, as if he suspected somebody might have kidnapped the girl as her family was making noise about, but she had took a suitcase filled with her clothes and some personals, so Joe knew she had up & skedaddled. But he also knew the was the Finger Of Blame looking for somebody to point at, and so the next day he decided it was time to move on. |
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1870 | Age 29 |
3rd duel with Terry McIvers, 2 weeks west of Hell Town. (details under construction) |
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1870 | Age 29 |
Now in 1870:
• Kill #10 - Rustler No.1 Chuck "Yellow Eye" Lucas
Joe was hired as a new foreman at the Kinard King's Double K ranch outside of Helltown. Upon Joe telling the goldbricking hands that they were now under a new foreman and would have to work for their keep, Chuck Lucas drew on Joe, not meaning to kill Joe but just to try to keep the upper hand in the situation, to keep sponging off Mr. King. But it is not in Joe's nature to stand still and have a gun drawn on him. Joe shot the man dead (here). • Kill #11 - Rustler No.3 (Name Unknown)
Cleared by the Sheriff for self-defense, Joe the next day learned that some cattle had been rustled from the ranch. Joe and two hands, Henry and Obediah, tracked the cattle northward. Joe tried to infiltrate the rustler's gang but was injured in a fight with Rustler No.2 Whit Morgan, and he woke up the next day in the Taylor Homestead where Rose Taylor was tending him since finding him on the open range. She was pregnant and Joe learned that the father was Yellow Eye. Very soon, the rustlers showed up looking for revenge. Joe managed to shoot one of them through the window; two others got into the house and Joe gunned them down, also; but now the house was ablaze and Joe was injured by a falling timber. Two rustlers (Nos.4&7) escaped after burning down the barn also, leaving Rose's father and brother dead in the yard and the homestead completely in ruins. Obediah showed up to rescue Joe from the burning house. With Obediah's help, by the next day, Rose was set up in nearby Two Springs where cattle from several rustlings had been taken after a Two Springs posse recaptured them from the rustlers. Mr. King was there also, and ordered Joe to drive the recovered cattle up to Tent City. |
Bad Daniel Cumacker was known from Kansas City to Corpus Christi, riverboat gambler, dandy, lady's man, involved in political corruption and racketeering in St.Louis and Kansas City.
Buddy Spencer's family made it rich in shipping in Connecticut and New York; they spoiled Buddy awfully until finally he became too much of a social burden on the family, so they gave him several thousand dollars and told him never come within 500 miles of Long Island sound again. Disowned but wealthy, he lived the rest of his short life just looking for trouble.
Caroline Twist was raised in London until age 15 when she ran away to America to seek adventure, which she found during her nine years here, from Philadelphia to Denver. She was notorious for supposedly having killed fifteen men, two of them in her own bed; actually she had killed only five. She was a misguided reader of Marion Kirkland Reid, and was to become historically one of the first of the misandronist sort of feminists, which sort gives the whole movement a bad name. Some people believed her to be a very pretty male, but that was a false rumor as she proved to a very select few men and women alike. She made a goodly fortune as a singer but she was very difficult to work with, strong-minded, hard-drinking, violent (ruthless in fisticuffs), and a self-professed sharpshooter although her actual skill with guns was very low except when the target was close and immobile, as three men learned the hard way.
Dr. Aaron James Rieman had studied medicine at Harvard but due to psychological issues he became fascinated with dissecting corpses, and soon enough he moved from dead bodies to live bodies. Although unrecorded in history he was one of the first serial murderers in America and he moved from territory to territory in various disguises, living for weeks or even months under some subterfuge while his mind boiled up to a fugue state when he would subdue and slaughter at least one person and usually more from wherever he was living at the time.
Red And White Father fancied himself a holy man and in fact his group were outcast from the "real" Shoshone because Red And White Father was preaching all manner of un-Indian things, including claiming to be born straight from the Great Spirit himself and saying that the Red people and the White people would live some day in peace once the "superior" White men had won their war and then come to feel guilty about it and made amends to the Red man, who would survive, but in very small numbers. Until that day of eventual peace, said Red And White Father, war would rage and a lot of blood would spill, mostly Indian blood at the hands of the White men. But this shaman also preached individual tolerance and forgiveness, which was a balm to the spirit of Joe Tucker under the circumstances. Joe spent the summer just hiding out from White men and getting his head clear after months of drinking. Anyway, much of what Red And White Father was saying, well, to Joe it made sense; the old man was very persuasive, except for his ideas about the Yellow Man, which Joe could make neither heads nor tails of.
Jimmy Ray Grant, ex-Confederate infantry and renegade, a bloodthirsty gunslinger with 12 kills (not couting his exploits in the war), half of the 12 downright un-called for, with a handful of Federal warrants and a price on his head of $500.
who had one brown eye and one yellow eye. Due to a feud with his violent father (still alive and scrapping at age 52), Yellow Eye moved west and eventually found work on the Double K ranch, where he would meet Joe Tucker and his fate.