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April 1958 Francis Boardman "Frank" Eaton Francis Boardman Eaton was born in 1860 in Hartford, Connecticut, and died April 8, 1958 in Perkins Oklahoma at the age of 97. At the age of eight, he moved with his family to Twin Mound Kansas and soon after the move his father was shot in cold blood by six former Confederates . The men from the Campsey and Ferber clans called themselves Regulators. In 1868, his fathers friend, Mose Beaman convinced him to avenge his father's death. That same year Mose taught him how to handle a gun. At the age of fifteen, he visited Fort Gibson, Oklahoma, a cavalry fort, to learn more about how to handle a gun before setting out to avenge the death. . Although too young to join the army, he outshot everyone at the fort and competed with the cavalry's best marksmen, beating them every time. Eaton claimed that after many competitions, the fort's commanding officer, Colonel John Joseph Coppinger, gave him a marksmanship badge and a new nickname, "Pistol Pete." During his teen years, he wrote that he was faster on the draw than Buffalo Bill. From his first days as a lawman, he was said to "pack the fastest guns in the Indian Territory." By the end of his career, he allegedly have eleven notches on his gun. At twenty-nine, he joined the land rush to Oklahoma Territory settling southwest of Perkins,Oklahoma where he served as sheriff and later became a blacksmith. He married twice, had nine children, 31 grandchildren, and lived to see three great-great-grandchildren. |