← Back to the front page

Pistol Pete’s Payback and Other Historic Vengeances

Khalid Elhassan October 15, 2020 31 min

World War II - Quisling — Quisling with SS chief Heinrich Himmler. Cotton Boll Conspiracy

35. Preparing for Payback

Old Mose Beaman wasted no time preparing Frank Eaton to exact payback for his father’s murder. He gave the then-eight-year-old Frank an old Navy Colt Revolver, and began teaching him how to handle a gun. The kid took to it like a duck to water, and before long, he could shoot the heads off rattlesnakes with either hand, simply by “point firing”.

At age fifteen, Frank headed to Fort Gibson, a US Army cavalry fort in Oklahoma, to learn more about firearms. He was too young to enlist but got some odd jobs around the fort. He reportedly competed with the fort’s best marksmen and outshot them all. That prompted their commander to bestow upon young Frank the nickname “Pistol Pete”. Soon thereafter, Pistol Pete learned that two of his father’s killers, Doc Ferber and Shannon Campsey, were living in a cabin near Webbers Falls, Oklahoma. So he headed there to get started on his payback.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.