The West of the movies is a quick draw at high noon. The real one was a job: long days on horseback, cheap wire, deep wells, and mail that had to get through. These stories keep the famous names and add the ones that got left out, from a deputy marshal who made three thousand arrests to a judge who never hanged anybody.
Every tile in a The Old West game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Lawmen and Outlaws
nine stories
1The deputy marshal who memorized his warrants
On the tile: Bass Reeves1875-1907
Born enslaved in Arkansas around 1838, Bass Reeves once asked his enslaver for permission to learn to read and was refused, so as a lawman he memorized his warrants and writs. He had learned something just as useful in Indian Territory: the languages and customs of several tribes, and the ways fugitives dodged arrest. Judge Parker's court hired him as a deputy U.S. marshal in 1875, and he served thirty-two years across more than seventy-five thousand square miles, sometimes in disguise. In 1901 he told a newspaper he had arrested over three thousand people.
Charles Boles robbed twenty-eight stagecoaches in northern California and southern Oregon between 1875 and 1883. He worked on foot, made a mask of a flour sack, and brandished a shotgun but, by the accounts that survive, never fired it. At two holdups he left verses, the second signed Black Bart, PO8. What finally caught him was laundry. A handkerchief dropped at his last holdup, in 1883, carried the mark F.X.O.7, and detectives worked through nearly ninety San Francisco laundries before one matched it. He served four years in San Quentin.
Isaac Parker spent twenty-one years on the federal bench at Fort Smith and is remembered as the Hanging Judge. The numbers sound like it: he sentenced one hundred sixty people to death, and seventy-nine men were hanged. But federal law then required a death sentence for any conviction of murder or rape, so once a jury said guilty, the judge had no choice. For fourteen of those years the condemned had no right of appeal. Parker did not attend the hangings. He often recessed court before an execution and went home.
On the tile: O.K. CorralOctober 26, 1881Myth busted
A minute of shooting in Tombstone got a name it does not deserve. On October 26, 1881, the Earps and Doc Holliday met the Clantons and McLaurys in a narrow vacant lot on Fremont Street, behind the corral rather than inside it, and the whole thing was over in less than a minute. Billy Clanton and both McLaury brothers were killed. Of the four men on the other side, only Wyatt Earp walked away without a wound.
The gang rode into Northfield, Minnesota, at two in the afternoon on September 7, 1876, expecting an easy hour. The bookkeeper at the First National told them the safe was on a timer and could not be opened, which was not true. Outside, townspeople grabbed their guns. Anselm Manning and Henry Wheeler each shot a robber from the street and a window. The gang rode off with pocket change and fifteen thousand dollars still in the bank, and the Youngers were caught two weeks later.
Sam Bass had one very good night. In September 1877 he rode with a band led by Joel Collins that stopped a Union Pacific train at Big Springs, Nebraska, and took sixty thousand dollars in newly minted twenty-dollar gold pieces. Back in Texas, Bass formed a new gang, and one of its members, Jim Murphy, turned informer and warned the Rangers about a plan to rob the bank at Round Rock. Bass was wounded there on July 19, 1878, and died two days later, on his twenty-seventh birthday.
John Wesley Hardin was one of the most dangerous gunmen Texas ever saw, and the Rangers finally took him at Pensacola, Florida, in 1877. Sentenced the next year to twenty-five years for a killing, he did something unexpected with the time. He read theology, ran the prison Sunday school, and studied law. Pardoned in 1894, he was admitted to the bar, and in 1895 he went to El Paso to open a law practice. He was shot and killed there that August.
Texas lawmakers created a specific force called the Texas Rangers on November 24, 1835: fifty-six men in three companies. Their fortunes rose and fell. After the Mexican War, the historian Walter Prescott Webb judged, they were for a decade "little more than an historical expression," and during Reconstruction other forces took over their work. In 1874 the Rangers came back with the Frontier Battalion under Major John B. Jones, six companies of seventy-five men each. It fought fifteen battles in 1874 alone, and by 1882 it had done its job so well it was no longer needed.
Roy Bean is often remembered as a hanging judge. Appointed a justice of the peace in 1882, he held court at his Jersey Lilly saloon in Langtry, Texas, and branded himself the Law West of the Pecos. He once fined a corpse forty dollars for carrying a concealed weapon, which paid for the funeral. The Handbook of Texas is blunt about the rest: he intimidated and cheated people, but he never hanged anybody. He also claimed he had named the town for the actress Lillie Langtry, though railroad records say it was named for a construction foreman, George Langtry.
The Pony Express looms large in Western legend, yet it ran for only about eighteen months, from April 1860 to October 1861. Riders carried mail more than eighteen hundred miles between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California, in about ten days, changing horses at relay stations along the way. It never made a profit. A half ounce of mail cost five dollars at first and later one dollar, and the company behind it went bankrupt. Once the transcontinental telegraph linked the coasts, the service was officially ended on October 26, 1861.
Before the Pony Express there was a stagecoach contract that read like a dare. An 1857 act of Congress authorized it, and John Butterfield and his associates won it: six hundred thousand dollars a year to carry mail twice a week from St. Louis and Memphis to San Francisco, a run of two thousand seven hundred ninety-five miles from St. Louis, in no more than twenty-five days. The coaches ran around the clock, carrying five or six passengers at two hundred dollars for the full trip west. Almost without exception, the mail made the deadline.
The Oregon Trail carried families. The Santa Fe Trail carried cargo. William Becknell opened it in September 1821, once Mexican independence made outside traders welcome where Spanish officials had been arresting them, and for sixty years it worked as a commercial highway between Missouri and New Mexico. Wagons chose between the Mountain Route, longer but with dependable water, and the Cimarron Route, shorter and dry. The railroad reached Santa Fe in February 1880 and the trail stopped being necessary.
Jesse Chisholm was a trader and interpreter of Scottish and Cherokee descent, and the path between his trading posts in Indian Territory became known locally as Chisholm's Trail. He was never a cattle drover, and he died in 1868, before that year's trail-driving season began. The cattle trail took his name because part of it followed his trade routes. From 1867 to 1884 it carried Texas herds north to Kansas cowtowns such as Abilene, Newton and Wichita, part of an estimated five million cattle driven out of Texas in those years.
The Comstock Lode, found in 1859, was the first major silver strike in the United States, and Virginia City, Nevada, boomed on top of it. Together with neighboring Gold Hill, it grew from about four thousand people in 1862 to roughly twenty-five thousand by 1874, and almost seven million tons of ore were mined and milled between 1860 and 1880. Then the Bank of California collapsed in 1875, the Great Fire swept the town in 1876, new veins proved poorer than estimated, and the boom faded. More than four hundred of its buildings survive.
Nicodemus, Kansas, is the oldest remaining Black town west of the Mississippi River, and the word doing the work in that sentence is remaining. Formerly enslaved people, most from around Lexington, Kentucky, founded it on the plains in 1877. Other Black homesteader towns on the plains faded away, but of those founded by that post-Reconstruction wave, Nicodemus is the last with permanent residents. The National Park Service protects five of its historic buildings, and every July hundreds of descendants come home for the Emancipation/Homecoming Celebration.
Brigham Young had planned an orderly spring departure from Nauvoo, Illinois, for some fifteen thousand Latter-day Saints. As anti-Mormon violence grew, he sent a vanguard ahead in late winter instead. The first wagons ferried across the Mississippi on February 4, 1846, and by March 1 some five hundred were lurching northwest over the winter-bare Iowa prairie toward the Missouri River. Young had meant that first company to number about eighteen hundred people; it swelled to around three thousand, many without wagons or supplies of their own. Their goal, the Great Basin, was still Mexican territory.
Fort Davis was ordered into existence in west Texas on October 23, 1854, and the Army reoccupied it in 1867 to protect travel on the San Antonio to El Paso road. An act of 1866 had given African Americans a permanent place in the Army, and from 1867 to 1885 Black soldiers of the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry and the Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth Infantry served there. In November 1880 a new quartermaster arrived: Lieutenant Henry O. Flipper, born enslaved in Georgia in 1856 and the first African American graduate of West Point.
Wyoming Territory had very few people and a shortage of reasons to move there. On December 10, 1869, Governor John Campbell signed a bill giving women the vote, carried by a council vote of six to two and a house vote of seven to four. The motives were mixed and several were cynical, including a frank hope for publicity. The results were not. Esther Hobart Morris took office as a justice of the peace in early 1870, and women sat on juries in Laramie that year and the next.
A laborer's wife asked the Reno tailor Jacob Davis for work pants that would not fall apart. He put metal rivets at the corners of the pockets and at the base of the button fly, and they held. Davis could not afford the patent paperwork, so he wrote to his fabric supplier, Levi Strauss, and proposed that the two of them file together. The patent issued on May 20, 1873. For decades the pants were called waist overalls; the name jeans did not take hold until 1960.
2Light as air, stronger than whiskey, cheap as dirt
On the tile: Wire Corral1876
Even ranchers who liked the idea of fencing scoffed at the notion that light wire could hold a Texas longhorn. In 1876 two salesmen, Pete McManus and John W. Gates, built a corral of Glidden's barbed wire on a San Antonio plaza, Alamo Plaza by some accounts and Military Plaza by others, and drove longhorns into it where a crowd could watch. The wire held. Gates sold it with a line that has outlived him, calling it light as air, stronger than whiskey, and cheap as dirt. Texas ranchers bought, and sales grew quickly.
On earlier, shorter drives, cowboys ate what they could carry in their saddlebags. In 1866 Charles Goodnight turned a surplus Army wagon into the first chuck wagon for the drive he made with Oliver Loving from Texas to Fort Sumner, New Mexico, adding a pantry box whose hinged door folded down into a table. The outfit suddenly had a kitchen that traveled with it. The same partnership laid out the route that became the Goodnight-Loving Trail, later one of the most heavily used cattle roads in the Southwest.
Daniel Halladay built an American windmill in 1854 with a tail that turned the wheel into the wind and sails that changed pitch to slow it when the wind blew too hard. Together they let the mill run with nobody tending it; a newspaper that year reported one working six months without a hand touching its sails. Before windmills, ranching in Texas stopped where the creeks stopped. After them, herds grazed country with no surface water at all. By 1900 the XIT Ranch alone had more than three hundred mills running.
The spur is far older than the cattle drives; its use can be traced back to Roman times. The cowboy asked two different things of it. Mounted, a spur was a working implement he could not do without. Dismounted, it was a social requirement. Many pairs were highly decorative, and the pattern called gal-leg had shanks shaped like a woman's legs, though the Handbook of Texas says utility always came first. Cowboys also pressed the spur into service as a branding iron and as a grave marker.
Branding is old enough to appear in Egyptian tomb paintings at least four thousand years old, and Hernan Cortes marked his cattle in Mexico with three Latin crosses. Texas turned it into a grammar. A letter lying on its side is lazy, a leaning letter is tumbling, a letter with wings is flying, and brands carry names like Hogeye or Buzzard on a Rail. From 1848 an unrecorded Texas brand was not legal evidence of ownership, a rule relaxed only in 1913 after thefts involving unrecorded brands went unpunished.
The American cowboy learned his trade from people who already knew it. Vaqueros in Spanish and Mexican Texas had worked out the saddle, the rope and the technique, and young Anglo hands picked all of it up as a matter of course. The words came along with the work. La reata, the rope, became lariat, and vaquero itself came into English as buckaroo, its spelling bent by the word buck. By the 1870s the gear was so widespread that it had lost its Hispanic identity and was simply called Texan.
Work on the first transcontinental telegraph started on July 4, 1861, and finished on October 24. Two companies raced toward each other, the Pacific Telegraph building west from Omaha and the Overland Telegraph building east from Carson City, stringing more than a thousand miles of line in under four months. The first message went out that evening, from the chief justice of California to President Lincoln. The Pony Express, until then the fastest mail across the continent, was officially shut down two days later.
The quarter horse got its name from colonial racing, when sprints of a quarter mile were run down the streets of colonial towns and this horse could outrun other breeds over that stretch. After the Civil War, Texas breeders crossed quarter horse stallions with the mustang mares already working the range. The result was a strong, agile mount that could stand the harsh climate, and gathering wild cattle in South Texas demanded exactly that. Cattlemen prized something else in it too, a natural instinct for working cattle that they called cow sense.
The wagon-train attack is the set piece of every western, and on the real trails it was close to the least of anyone's worries. Of roughly three hundred fifty thousand people who started west, nearly one in ten did not survive, and the National Park Service puts disease first by a wide margin, with as many as thirty thousand deaths. Cholera killed more than every other illness combined. After sickness came accidents: emigrants shot themselves with their own guns, drowned at river crossings and fell under their own wagon wheels.
2A nickname claimed a year before its novel existed
On the tile: Deadwood DickJuly 4, 1876Legend
Nat Love was born enslaved in Tennessee in 1854 and headed west at fifteen to work cattle. In his 1907 autobiography he wrote that on July 4, 1876, in Deadwood, he beat all comers at riding, roping and shooting, and the crowd named him Deadwood Dick. The trouble is the calendar. Deadwood Dick was a dime-novel hero created by Edward L. Wheeler, a writer who never went west of Pennsylvania, and his first adventure came out in 1877, the year after. Scholars suspect Love borrowed the famous name to dress up his own story.
Congress set aside thirty thousand dollars in March 1855 to buy camels for the Army, an idea pushed by Secretary of War Jefferson Davis. Thirty-three of them reached Indianola, Texas, in the spring of 1856, with forty-one more in February 1857, and they worked: a camel could carry as much as six hundred pounds and cross long stretches without water. The trouble was everything else. They smelled terrible, frightened the horses, and were detested by handlers used to mules. In 1866 the government sold the survivors at auction.
The Homestead Act of 1862 offered one hundred sixty acres of federal land to anyone over twenty-one or heading a household who would live on it, build a home and farm it. Over the next hundred twenty-three years millions filed claims, among them single women and formerly enslaved people, and about two hundred seventy million acres passed into private hands, roughly a tenth of the United States, across thirty states. To the settlers the West looked empty. To the Native nations it was home, and they were pushed from their homelands or crowded onto reservations.
A contracted drive might move three thousand head with a crew of about eleven, covering ten to fifteen miles a day and reaching market in about six weeks. An estimated two-thirds of the hands were white, most of them youths between twelve and eighteen. The rest were Black, Hispanic and American Indian men, usually older, who often worked as cooks and horse wranglers. Pay followed the job: twenty-five to forty dollars a month for an ordinary hand, fifty for a wrangler, seventy-five for a cook, and a hundred or more for the trail boss.
The mounted longhorn skull over a ranch gate is a real animal and a misleading average. Those enormous spreads belonged to steers four years and older, which were common in postwar trail herds. By the 1880s, with younger, better-bred cattle going north, the average spread was under four feet. Crossbreeding with Durhams and then Herefords nearly finished the breed, and by the 1920s only a few small herds remained. Forest Service men gathered breeding stock for an Oklahoma wildlife refuge in 1927, and the writer J. Frank Dobie later gathered small herds for Texas state parks.
Mary Fields was born enslaved in Tennessee in the early 1830s and arrived at St. Peter's Mission in Montana in 1885. In 1895, in her sixties, she took on a star route, a contract mail run between Cascade and the mission, and the Postal Service's own historians call her the earliest African American woman known to have carried the mail. For eight years she covered a thirty-four mile round trip, remembered for never missing a day, and when the snow was too deep for the coach she put on snowshoes and walked it.
Four ceremonial spikes came to Promontory Summit on May 10, 1869, including a gold one weighing just over fourteen ounces. None of them were driven. Gold is soft and the spikes were valuable, so they were tapped for the crowd and then pulled straight back out. Workers dropped in a pine tie and hammered three ordinary iron spikes to actually join the rails. The gold spike went home with the donor who paid for it and now sits in a museum at Stanford.
Cowboys are not remembered as organized labor, but in 1883 some tried it. Hands from three Panhandle ranches drew up an ultimatum, and twenty-four men signed it and set March 31 to walk out. New owners backed by eastern and European investors had ended the old custom of letting cowboys brand strays and run small herds of their own, and pay averaged about forty dollars a month. Reports of the strike's size ran from thirty men to three hundred twenty-five. It lasted about two and a half months before the ranches broke it by firing strikers and hiring replacements.