Marion Gordon

From The Great Outdoor Fight

Marion Gordon is mainly remembered as being the first to successfully smuggle a handgun into the Great Outdoor Fight, in 1881. The gun in question was the famed Colt Single Action Army revolver. Gordon concealed the gun within a false leg (his left). Sometime after noon on Day 1, Gordon drew the pistol and opened fire into a crowd. No one was killed, but three men - P.G.F. Muste, Benjamin Mulholland, and Fight favorite Jonathan "Bull" McCaine - were seriously injured.

Shortly after Gordon opened fire, the organizers immediately swarmed the field. Gordon was caught while attempting to reload the revolver. Five seconds later, all of his limbs were broken, and the pistol had been taken from him. Once the organizers established that Gordon had not killed anyone, the wounded were removed and the Fight continued. Gordon, for his part, was dragged outside and hung on the Fence, without food or water, for the next three days. According to legend, the offending weapon was reloaded and shoved into Gordon's anal cavity, where it remained for the remainder of the Fight.

Historian Richard Suliman wrote in 2000, "'The Gordon Horror,' as it was called, was considered at the time to be an extraordinary betrayal of everything the Fight stood for. While it had been said that Colt made all men equal, even in those early days, the Fight was believed to be something special, somehow beyond the realm of ordinary violence. In many respects, the conception of the modern Fight began in the reaction to Gordon. Perhaps it can be said that the Fight's evolution into what it would become began with a single man, strung up on a fence, with a revolver shoved up his ass."