On the morning of February 23, 1940, at 1438 North Gower
Street, called the Gower Gulch, a cowboy named Jerome “Blackjack” Ward shot and
killed another cowboy named Johnny Tyke.
The shooting was over a woman.
Both of the characters made their living as extras in the
cowboy's films that were churned out then by studios although the poverty row
studios more or less had a lock on the genre.
Most of the cowboy extras gathered between films at the
corner of Gower Street and Sunset Boulevard, which was near enough to the
studios that the cowpokes could walk to work.
Blackjack Ward had been a range rider most of his life, and, he said, had proudly served with Pancho Villa’s in the Mexican revolution of 1910. By the 1930s, the old west was completely gone, and Blackjack found his way into Hollywood. The man he killed, Johnny Tyke, another western film extra didn’t have Blackjack’s lineage. He was mostly a criminal who was wanted for a string of strong-arm hold-ups.
On the day Blackjack Ward shot and killed Johnny Tyke, a
crowd of about fifty cowboy extras were milling around the outside the
drugstore on the corner of Gower and Sunset. Blackjack Ward was there when
Johnny Tyke showed up.
“I had known Tyke for quite a while” Blackjack said “ I fed
and helped that varmint for years. A few months ago, he was in jail for drunk
driving, but I didn’t go to see him and, when he got out, he kept pestering me
because of it. We had arguments and he threatened me. One day he said he was
going to beat me to death or else use his Bowie knife on me.
Well, we met in the drugstore where the boys hang out, and Tyke started in again. He got real abusive and called me names no man worth the powder to blow him to hell will take back where I come from in old Arizona, but I says, ‘Look here, you’re bigger than me and you probably could whip me. There ain’t no sense to this anyway, and I don’t want no trouble. I got in my car and started to drive away. Tyke jumped in front of the car and yelled, ‘No you don’t. Let’s settle this right now.’
Well, I usually carry my old gun with me; just a sort of
habit a man gets into when he spends a lot of time riding the range. When Tyke
tried to get in the car, I shot at him once through the windshield and drove
off.”
That wasn’t even close to what actually happened. Blackjack and Tyke had fought it out down the street and into an alley. A witness said “I tried to edge into where I could make them listen to reason. I heard Blackjack say, ‘You been botherin’ me for the last time.’ But Tyke was goin’ for a weapon. At least, it sure looked like it, because he passed up a lot of doors.”
Blackjack shot him and then shot again, in the head. He took
off but was stopped by police a few blocks away. Seeing the cops Blackjack
jumped from his car and pulled out his weapon and fanned the lawmen, frontier
style.” But the gun was empty. The cops leaped on him, arrested him for murder
and carried him off to jail.
At the trial that July Blackjack claimed self-defense, but
no weapon was found on Tyke’s person. Another extra named Yukon Jake Jackson
took the stand and pulled out a knife saying, “This here knife was
Johnny Tyke’s. I heard Blackjack testify that Tyke had said he was going to cut
Ward’s heart out with his shiv. That started me to thinkin’.”
He said that just after the day of the killing, he had taken
his Doberman out into the parking lot where Tyke had died. “My mutt started
prowling round in some bushes. He dug up this knife. I didn’t think nothing of
it at the time and stuck it in my pocket and tossed it in with my fishing
tackle. I forgot all about it until I heard what Blackjack said.”
A shoemaker named Joseph Hebec, who made the steep-heel
boots that the cowboy extras wore, identified the knife as the one that he had
previously testified to having seen Tyke carrying shortly before he was killed.
The prosecutor dismissed the case. But it was all over Blackjack, the studios
didn’t want him around after that.
Blackjack died in bed with his boots off, 1954, at the
age of 63, three years after he was fined $50 for chasing a stall owner through
a market with a meat cleaver after the man refused to loan him one dollar.
