• The Wild Bunch Gang

    One of the most successful train robbing gang’s during the Old West era was Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch Gang. They were just one of a few loosely organized gangs operating in Wyoming. Butch Cassidy (Robert Leroy Parker) was the leader and other members included Cassidy’s closest friend Elzy Lay, the Sundance Kid (Harry Alonzo Longabaugh), Tall Texan (Ben Kilpatrick), News Carver (William Carver), Camila “Deaf Charlie” Hanks, Laura Bullion, Flat-Nose Curry (George Sutherland Curry), Kid Curry (Harvey Alexander Logan) and Bob Meeks. They claimed to make every attempt to avoid killing anyone, and Cassidy would boast that he never killed a man. Unfortunately, that proved to be false because Kid…

  • Pat Garrett

    Patrick Floyd Garrett was born in Cusseta, Alabama, and grew up on a Louisiana plantation near Haynesville in northern Claiborne Parish, just below the Arkansas state line. His parents were John Lumpkin Garrett and Elizabeth Ann Jarvis. Garrett would always stand out because he was well over six feet tall. He is probably most famous for being the man who killed “Billy the Kid”. Garrett left home in 1869 and found work as a cowboy in Dallas County, Texas. In 1875, he left to hunt buffalo. In 1878, Garrett shot and killed a fellow hunter who charged him with a hatchet during a disagreement over buffalo hides. As he lay…

  • Mountain Meadows Massacre

    On September 11th, 1857, a group of migrants travelling from Arkansas to their new home in California, were massacred in a valley in Utah known as Mountain Meadows, ostensibly by a group of Paiute Indians following a siege lasting several days. The Baker-Fancher group totalled around 140 members of an extended family or families. Quite well-off by standards of the day, they were making their way by wagon train with horses, mules and cattle to resettle from Arkansas. Led by Alexander Fancher, known as “Colonel” an experienced man on the migrant route, the train had started out with several smaller parties each from different counties in Arkansas, and had met…

  • Gunfight at the O.K. Corral

    “Fast is fine, but accuracy is everything. In a gun fight… You need to take your time in a hurry.” Words couldn’t have been truer than those spoken by Wyatt Earp. A total of thirty shots were fired in thirty seconds in the most famous shootout in the history of the American Old West. I will of course follow this article up with more about Wyatt’s vendetta, and biographies of the key players, but for now I will concentrate on the infamous gunfight itself. Tombstone, Arizona is located near the Mexican border. The Earps arrived on December 1, 1879, when the small town was mostly composed of tents as living…