"Seven-Toed Pete"

[Mullins, Bill]

Ben's 7T Pete may be this person:

http://www.gilleysgallery.com/PAGES/FINE%20ART/20CENTURY_MEXART/sloan_7toedP
ete.html

in a print of a piece of art by John Sloan.


> No need to invoke polydactylic felines, I don't think.
> There's at least one citation suggesting that a character
> named "Seven-Toed Pete" was known from Western dime novels:
>
>    Los Angeles Times, Apr 21, 1895, p. 14
>    [Referring to a man found not guilty of holding up an Oregon bank
>    by reason of insanity:] "He is a man of 49 years of age, with the
>    impulses and judgment of a boy of 13 to 15 years, who, with his
>    head stuffed full of the garish fiction of dime novels, emulates
>    the conduct of heroic Seven-toed Pete, and sallies forth armed
>    with a sharpened caseknife to lift the scalps of imaginary
>    redskins in the persons of inoffensive small children."
>
> I don't see any other references to a "Seven-Toed Pete", but
> there are several late-19th-century cites referring to men
> nicknamed "Six-Toed Pete", usually in Western frontier towns.
>  (Some websites mention a "Six-Toed Pete" in stories about
> Wild Bill Hickock.)  The most interesting character is a man
> whose real name was Pedro Badillo (or Badillos).  He is
> described in a Reno Evening Gazette article of May 30, 1876
> as someone who had stood for office in Los Angeles but then
> had to flee the country after being discovered as a horse
> thief.  He turns up in a Los Angeles Times article of Feb.
> 25, 1894 as a "smuggler and land pirate" in Mexico who had
> used the customhouse at Tiajuana as a fort and "defied the
> gendarmes of the learned but vacillating Governor, Don Manuel
> Clemente Rojo."  Another LA Times article, on Aug. 16, 1896,
> says he had "engaged in an unsuccessful revolt against the
> Mexican government, after proclaiming himself Governor of
> Sonora."  By that time Six-Toed Pete had settled in the
> border town of Nogales (Arizona/Sonora): "Although Pete's
> hair is now as white as snow, he yet turns the cards with
> nimble fingers, and will bet 500 'dobles' (Mexican dollars)
> on a rooster fight, as he did in early times."
>
>
> --Ben Zimmer
>