Judge Roy Bean

Despite the mandate that only district courts were legally allowed to grant divorces, Bean did so anyway, and pocketed $10 for each divorce. He would charge $5 for weddings, and ended all wedding ceremonies with the phrase “and may God have mercy on your souls,” which was traditionally said when a death sentence is carried out. When a Mexican received permission for one day off from work by his boss to marry his future wife, there was not enough time to secure a license, so Bean married them anyway and proclaimed that the marriage license would arrive by the next day’s mail after charging them his usual $5 marriage fee. After he performed the marriage of two Mexican couples, they later came before Bean and asked to be divorced and remarried to the other person’s spouses; Bean agreed to the demand, charging each $10 for marriages and $40 for divorces.

He continued to conduct his own brand of law within his courtroom, and when a railroad contractor named Howard, who had some law training, was brought into court and read from the latest revised law statutes, Bean remitted the fine but rendered a verdict that no law books were to be brought into his court. A rival saloon owner named Torrano was brought before Bean charged with assault. A jury of six of Bean’s regulars found the accused guilty and fined him two dozen bottles of beer. Bean forbid his rival from buying beer at his own saloon and instead had him pay retail fine at The Jersey Lilly. Bean won re-election to his post in 1884, but was defeated in 1886. By the following year, the commissioner’s court created a new precinct in the county, and Bean was appointed to be the new justice of the peace. He would continue to be re-elected until 1896, and after his defeat, it was reported “he refused to surrender his seal and law book and continued to try all cases north of the tracks”.

In 1890, Bean received word that railroad developer, speculator and robber baron Jay Gould, who had once attempted to take control of the Erie Railroad from Cornelius Vanderbilt, was passing through Langtry on a special train. Bean flagged down the train using the danger signal, and believing the bridge was out, the engineer stopped the train. To his surprise, Gould and his daughter were then invited by Bean to visit the saloon as his guests. The Gould’s two hour visit reportedly caused a brief panic on the New York Stock Exchange, when it was erroneously reported that Gould had been killed in a train crash. On April 16, 1897, there was an accidental collision between two trains during which one man, Robert Beckman, was killed and four others scalded. The inquest was presided over by Judge Bean, who brought the body of Beckman to Langtry for burial in the Langtry graveyard.

Bean organized a In 1896 world championship boxing title bout between Bob Fitzsimmons and Peter Maher on an island in the Rio Grande. The fight was hosted there because boxing matches were illegal in both Texas and Mexico. As a result of the fight, which lasted only 1 minute and 35 seconds, and was won by Fitzsimmons, Bean’s fame throughout the United States. During him term as a judge, and despite his becoming known as a ‘hanging judge’, Bean was known to have sentenced only two men to hang, one of whom escaped. In most other jurisdictions, horse thieves were often sentenced to death, but Bean always allowed them to go if the horses were returned to their owners. As was reported in March 1897’s edition of Leslie’s Weekly read, “The picture in your publication of March 11, of Judge Roy Bean is all right, except the collar and cravat. He was once trying a Mexican on a charge of horse stealing and his charge was the shortest on record: Gentlemen of the Jury, there’s a greaser in the box and a hoss missing. You know your duty, and they did.”

In the later years, Bean spent much of his profits helping the poor of the area and always made sure that the local schoolhouse had free firewood in the winter. In January 1901, it was reported that Bean stated that a claim for damages of $13,000 from Apache depredations of his mules would certainly be allowed. On 16 March 1903, after a bout of heavy drinking in San Antonio, Roy Bean died peacefully in his bed. He was interred, along with his son, Sam Bean (1874–1907), at the Whitehead Memorial Museum in Del Rio. In 1965, as part of the Civil War Centennial commemoration in Texas, an official Texas Historical Marker honoring Roy Bean was erected on the museum grounds in Del Rio, Texas. Bean has been portrayed on both the small and big screen by a variety of actors.

In the 1940 film The Westerner, he was played by Walter Brennan, for which he won a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award. The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, a 1972 heavily fictionalized theatrical biopic starred Paul Newman as Bean, while Ned Beatty portrayed the Langtry Judge in the 1995 TV mini-series Streets of Laredo, starring alongside James Garner and based on the Larry McMurtry novel of the same name. In the 1969 film A Time for Dying, which portrayed the Vinegaroon period, starred Audie Murphy starred as Jesse James and Victor Jory played a half-crazed Judge Roy Bean. Brad Sullivan played Judge Roy Bean in the television movie, The Gambler: The Luck of the Draw, alongside Kenny Rogers and Reba McEntire. Bean is best remembered as a scallywag of the lawless wild west, the gambler, saloon-keeper and one-time smuggler who found himself as the ultimate law west of the Pecos.