The Acid Pen of Charles Matthews: Journalism, Corruption, and Assassination in Gilded Age Hot Springs

In 1882, the editor of the Hot Springs Daily Hornet took on the city's most powerful men. They answered his ink with bullets, silencing him in the middle of Valley Street.

You have to understand something about old-school Hot Springs. “Honor” was a thing. A very big thing. The kind of thing that could get you shot in the middle of the street on a Friday afternoon.

The entire city operated on a system of polite corruption. Didn’t hide it. Barely even whispered about it. The gambling dens and saloons paid their “fines,” and those fines paid for the police and paved the roads. A racket? Absolutely. But it was a racket that worked for everyone. A perfectly balanced ecosystem.

And into that ecosystem walks Charles Matthews.

Matthews had a newspaper, The Daily Hornet, and a serious problem with authority. The man was a walking confrontation. He’d already survived one shootout with the damn mayor and lived to tell the tale, too. So, a healthy sense of self-preservation? Not exactly his strong suit.

And his next targets? They weren’t just big shots; they were the town. Captain Samuel Fordyce, Colonel D.C. Rugg, and their business associate, Frank Flynn. The pillars of the community, basically, if your community was built on poker, bourbon, and taking the waters.

But Matthews didn’t expose a single secret. Not one. Everyone in Hot Springs knew exactly how the town worked. His real crime was so much worse.

He printed it.

In black and white. For God and everybody to see. And you just didn’t do that. Not to these men. They didn’t write strongly worded letters to the editor. The response that came wasn’t a lawsuit. It was a public beatdown and an execution on the muddiest street in town.

Valley Street (now Central Avenue) in the 1880s. A place where a man's honor was worth more than his life, and public disputes were often settled with gunfire, not lawsuits.