August 7, 1871 Charles Couger is sitting on a bed reading a newspaper in the American House in Abilene, Kansas. Four shots are fired from outside his room, with the bullets coming through a “board partition,” one of which strikes him “in the fleshy part of the left arm, passing through the third rib and entering the heart, cutting a piece of it entirely off, and killing Couger almost instantly,” the Abilene Chronicle reports on August 10. The newspaper also reports that the murd


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