Known as “Buckskin Frank,” Leslie arrived in Tombstone with a carefully cultivated frontier image—but much of the life he claimed before Arizona remains undocumented.
Before Tombstone
Frank Leslie’s early history is difficult to separate from the stories he later told about himself. He gave his full name as Nashville Franklyn Leslie and generally placed his birth in Texas around 1842, although records differ over the exact place and even the names of his parents.
Leslie claimed an adventurous past. At various times, he said he had served in the Confederate Army, worked as an Army scout, ridden with Wild Bill Hickok, traveled in Australia and the Fiji Islands, studied medicine in Germany, and performed as an exhibition marksman.
Those accounts helped create the image Leslie wanted people to see. Documentation supporting most of them has not been found.
The San Francisco Record
The first reasonably firm record of Leslie appears in San Francisco.
City directories list him working as a bartender in 1878. He was employed at Thomas Boland’s saloon on Pine Street and lived on Howard Street. During the following two years, he was connected with Kerr and Jurado’s Saloon and Billiard Room and lived on Folsom Street.
These directory listings place Leslie in the saloon business before he came to Arizona. They also present a different picture from the wandering soldier, scout and frontier adventurer he later described.
Arrival in Tombstone
Leslie reached Tombstone during the town’s first great period of growth. He was present by April 1880, although the exact date of his arrival remains uncertain.
Contemporary descriptions associated him with buckskin clothing and the appearance of a frontier scout. Once established in Tombstone, however, Leslie reportedly adopted more fashionable clothing while retaining a fringed buckskin vest. The combination helped produce the name that followed him: “Buckskin Frank.”
He entered the saloon trade and became associated with William H. Knapp in the Cosmopolitan Saloon, located beside the Cosmopolitan Hotel on Allen Street.
By then, Leslie had successfully introduced himself to Tombstone. Whether he had actually lived the adventurous life he claimed was another question.
What the Record Shows
The documented Frank Leslie was a San Francisco bartender who came to a rapidly growing Arizona mining town and entered the same business there.
The soldier, scout, lawman, world traveler and expert marksman described in Leslie’s stories is much harder to verify. Some of those claims may have contained pieces of truth. Others appear to have been embellishments—or deliberate inventions.
Frank Leslie arrived in Tombstone with both a name and a character already under construction. What happened after his arrival would make “Buckskin Frank” one of the town’s better-known—and more controversial—figures.