Dawn Riders The Old West!!

Many stories surround the mysteries that portray the life of The Wild West. The Old West was not only home to pioneering men and women trying to stake their claim in a new land, but to outlaws and hardened criminals preying on the weak where there were few laws to protect them.
After the American Civil War ended in 1877 the law enforcement of the American West was in turmoil. Little or no jurisdiction monitored or controlled the criminal activities that were sweeping the states. From this came the name 'The Wild West', thus being so that living during this period was wild and uncontrolled. Gangs formed and Crime grew. The government realised that something had to be done and so a campaign of recruitment began of Law Enforcement Officers throughout the states of America.

On this page I have researched and tried to explain in detail some of the History of the Wild West. From Gunslingers to Indians and Robbers to Lawmen I have picked some of the finest heros and villians as dictated from the American West. If there is a profile you would like to see here then please do not hesitate to contact me and I will do all I can to display the information on this page.
I hope you enjoy the information gathered here on the Good, the Bad and even the damn Ugly !!!

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WYATT EARP was a legendary frontiersman of the American West, who was an itinerant saloonkeeper, gambler, lawman, gunslinger and confidence man.
Earp and his four brothers - James C. (1841-1926), Virgil W. (1843-1906), Morgan (1851-1852) and Warren B. (1855-1900) - spent their early lives in Illinois and Iowa but, toward the end of the American Civil War (1864), moved with their parents to San Bernardino, California. In 1868 the family moved back to Illinois, Wyatt and Virgil working on a pacific Union railroad crew on the way home. After the Earps moved to Lamar, Wyatt married in 1870 and was elected local constable, but upon his wifes death of Typhoid, he took off, drifting from Indian Territory to various towns in Kansas. He worked as a Police Officer in Wichita (1875-76) and Dodge City (1876-77), went off to the Gold Rush in the Black Hills (1877-78) and returned to Dodge City as assistant Marshal (1878-79) were he became noted as both Lawman and Gambler and where he befriended such gunmen as Doc Holliday and Bat Materson.
Leaving Dodge City with his second wife, he went to New Mexico and then California, working for a time as a wells fargo guard, and ended up in 1878 in the Wild West town of Tombstone, Arizona. Mos tof the Earp family had congregated there, buying real estate and businesses. Wyatt became a Gambler and a Guard in the Oriental Saloon, and his brother Virgil became the town Marshal.

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Wyatt Earp

Berry Stapp

19/3/1848
(Monmouth Illinois)
13/1/1929
(Los Angeles, CA)

By 1881 a feud had developed between the Earps and a gang led by Ike Clanton. The feud was resolved in the celebrated gunfight at the O.K. Corral (Oct 26, 1881), pitting the Clanton gang against three Earp brothers (Virgil, Wyatt and Morgan) and Doc Holliday. Three of the Clanton gang were killed, but Ike and another member escaped. The townspeople then discharged Virgil Earp on suspicion that the gunning was murder rather than crime fighting.
In March 1882 Morgan Earp was killed by unknown assasins, and Wyatt, his brother Warren and some friends subsequently killed at least two suspects.

Wyatt was accused of Murder, and he fled, moving first to Colorado, then to several boomtowns in the West, and eventually to California. He settled there, where he supported himself variously by police work, gambling, mining and real-estate deals.

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Patrick Floyd Garrett

Pat Garrett

5/6/1850
(Alabama)
29/2/1908
(New Mexico)

PAT GARRETT was a famous western U.S. lawman known as the man who killed Billy the Kid.
Born in Alabama and reared in Louisiana, Garrett left home at about the age of 17 and headed for Texas and the life of a cowboy and buffalo hunter. In 1879 he married and settled in Lincoln County, New Mexico where he became the first deputy sheriff and then sheriff. In July 1881 he tracked down and shot the escaped murderer, Billy the Kid.
Thereafter, Garrett was a rancher near Roswell, New Mexico (1882-96), deputy sheriff and then sheriff of Dona Ana County, New Mexico (1896-1902), and collector of El Paso, Texas (1902-06). He then bought a horse ranch, leased it, and became involved in a heated dispute over the lease. Garrett was fatally shot on the road from the ranch to Las Cruces, New Mexico. The man who had leased the ranch, Wayne Brazel, alleged that Garrett had drawn a gun on him and that he only killed in self defense. A witness agreed, and Brazel was set free. A suspicion lingered that Brazel or someone else conspired to execute Garrett, a lawman with many enimies.

BILLY THE KID who was rumoured to have been born Henry McCarty was one of the most notorious gunfighters of the American West, reputed to have killed at least 27 men before finally being gunned down at around about the age of 21 years old.

Born on New York City's East Side, Billy as a child migrated with his parents to

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William H Bonney

Billy the Kid

23/11/1859-60
(New York)
14/7/1881
(New Mexico)

Kansas; his father died there, and the mother and her two boys moved to Colorado, where she remarried. The family moved to New Mexico, and, in his early teens, Billy fell into a career of thievery and lawlessness, wandering throught the Southwest and Northern Mexico, often with gangs.
In December 1880 he was captured by Sheriff Patrick Floyd Garrett and stood trial for murder in Mesilla, New Mexico, in April 1881; he was found guilty and sentenced to hang. He escaped jail on April 30, however, killing two deputies, and remained at large until tracked down and ambushed by Garrett, who shot him dead on the evening of July 14 at the ranch home of Pete Maxwell.
Billy the Kid's grave is in Fort Summer, New Mexico.

As a child, Billy the Kid went under the name of Henry McCarty. Scholary opinion is divided over whether that or William H Bonney, Jr. (the name he used later, as in the trial), was his true name. Another hypothesis is that Billy the Kid was in fact Ollie L. "Brushy Bill" Roberts, who escaped, lived in Mexico and the U.S. Southwest, rode in Wild West Shows, and died in 1950 in Hico, Texas

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Ta-sunko-witko

Crazy Horse

1842
(Rapid City)
5/9/1877
(Fort Robinson)

CRAZY HORSE, a Sioux Indian Chief of the Oglala tribe who was an able tactician and determind warrior in the Sioux resistance to the white man's invasion of the northern Great Plains.

As early as 1865, Crazy Horse was a leader in his people's defiance of the U.S. plans to construct a road to the goldfields in Montana. He participated in the massacre of Captain William J. Fetterman and his troop of 80 men (Dec 21, 1866) as well as in the Wagon Box fight (Aug 2, 1867), both near Fort Phil Kearny, in Wyoming Territory. Refusing to honour the reservation provisions of the Second Treaty of Fort Larime (1868), Crazy Horse led his followers to unceded buffalo country, where they continued to hunt, fish and wage war against enemy tribes as well as whites.
When gold was discovered in the Black Hills, Dakota Territory, in 1874, prospectors disregarded Sioux treaty rights and swarmed onto the Indian reservation there. General George Crook thereupon set out to force Crazy Horse from his winter encampments on the Tongue and Powder rivers in Montana territory, but the chief simply retreated deeper into the hills. Joining Cheyenne forces, he took part in a surprise attack on Crook in the Rosebud valley (June 17, 1876), in southern Montana, forcing Crook's withdrawal..

Crazy Horse then moved north to unite with the main Sioux encampment of Chief Sitting Bull on the banks of the Little Bighorn River, where he helped annihilate a battalion of U.S. soldiers under Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer (June 25, 1876), Crazy Horse and his followers then returned to the hill country to resume their old ways. He was pursued by Colonel Nelson A. Miles in a stepped up campaign to force all Indians to come to the government agencies. His tribe weakened by cold and hunger, Crazy Horse finally surrended to General Crook at the Red Cloud Agency in Nebraska on May 6, 1877. Confined to Fort Robinson, he was killed in a scuffle with soldiers who were trying to imprison him in a gaurdhouse

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Robert LeRoy Parker

Butch Cassidy

13/4/1866
(Beaver, Utah)
1909?
(San Vicente, Bolivia)

BUTCH CASSIDY, an American outlaw and foremost member of the Wild Bunch, a collection of bank and train robbers who ranged through the western United States in the 1880's and 90's.
Robert Parker took his alias from Mike Cassidy, an older outlaw from whom he learned cattle rustling and gunslinging (1884-87). Thereafter - except for two years of chiefly cowboying (1891-92) and two years (1894-96) in Wyoming State Prison - he was teamed up with a succesion of outlaws. His favourite friend and confederate was Elzy Lay, with whom, alone or in a gang, he helped rob a number of trains, banks, paymasters and rustled horses and, less often, cattle.
The year after Elzy was arrested and imprisoned (1899), Cassidy teamed up with Harry Longabaugh, the Sundance Kid. By then, sheriff posses and Pinkerton Detectives were capturing or closing in on members of the Wild Bunch, and Cassidy and Sundance (with Sundance's girlfriend, Etta Place) escaped to New York City and then to South America (1901). (Etta Place returned home in 1907). From 1902 to 1906 they owned and ran a ranch in Chubut province, Argentina, but thereafter they returned to outlawry. Drifting from country to country, they robbed banks,

trains and mine stations until 1909, when, according to Pinkerton agents, they were trapped by a group of mounted soldiers near San Vincete, Bolivia, where Sundance was mortally shot and Cassidy shot himself. Another story puts their deaths in Mercedes, Uruguay, in December 1911, cut down by soldiers during a failed bank robbery. Still other stories have Cassidy (either alone or with Sundance) returning to the United States, drifting from Mexico to Alaska, and dying in obscurity in 1937 in the Northwest or in Nevada (possibly Spokane, Washington or Johnny, Nevada)

Sundance and Etta Place

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Harry Longabaugh

Sundance Kid

1870
(Phoenixville)
1909?
(San Vicente, Bolivia)

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Jesse Woodson James

Jesse James

5/9/1847
(Centerville)
3/4/1882
(St. Joseph, MO.)

Alexander Franklin James

Frank James

10/1/1843
(Centerville)
18/2/1915
(Kearney)

JESSE JAMES and FRANK JAMES, two brothers who were among the most notorious outlaws of the American West, engaging in robberies that came to typify the hazards of the 19th century frontier as it has been portrayed in motion-picture Westerns.
Reared on a Missouri farm, Jesse and Frank shared their family's sympathy with the Southern cause when the American Cvil War broke out (1861). Frank joined William C. Quantrill's Confederate guerillas, becoming friends with Cole Younger, a fellow member. Jesse followed suit by joining "Bloody" Bill Andersons Guerilla band. At the end of the war the bands surrended, but Jesse was reportedly shot and severley wounded by Federal soldiers while under a flag of truce. He and Frank, joined by eight other men then began their outlaw career by robbing a bank in Liberty, Mo., on Feb 13, 1866. During the same year, Cole Younger joined the gang, with the other Younger brothers following his lead one by one

during the next few years. The James gang robbed banks from Iowa to Albama and Texas and began holding up trains in 1873. The bandits also preyed on stagecoaches, stores and individuals. Throughout their long career afterward, their exploits were seized upon by writers who exaggerated and romanticized their deeds to meet the demands of Eastern readers for bloody Western tales of derrring-do. To the Missouri Ozark people, Jesse James emerged as a romantic figure, hounded into a life of crime by authorities who never forgave his allegiance to the South. Jesse and Frank did, in fact, always seek to justify

their bandity on the grounds of persecution.
On September 7, 1876, the James gang was nearly destroyed while trying to rob the First National Bank at Northfield, Minn. Of the eight bandits, only the James brothers escaped death or capture. After gathering a new gang in 1879, the James brothers resumed robbing, and in 1881, Missouri governer Thomas T. Crittenden offered a $10,000 reward for their capture, dead or alive. While living at St. Joseph under the pseudonym of Thomas Howard, the unarmed Jesse was adjusting a picture on the wall in his home when he was shot in the back of the head and instantly killed by Robert Ford, a gang member, who daimed the reward. A few months later, Frank James gave himself up. He was tried for murder in Missouri and found not guilty and again released. A free man, he retired to a quiet life on his family's farm, dying in 1915 in the room in which he was born.

Goyathlay
("One who yawns")
Geronimo

June 1829
(Mexico)
17/2/1909
(Oklaholma)

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GERONIMO was the Bedonkohe Apache leader of the Chiricahua Apache, who led his people's defense of their homeland against the military might of the United States.
For generations the Apaches had resisted white colonization of their homeland in the Southwest by both Spaniards and North Americans. Geronimo continued the tradtion of his ancestors from the day he was admitted to the warriors' council in 1846, participating in raids into Sonora and Chihuahua in Mexico. He was further embittered by the death of his mother, wife and children at the hands of the Mexicans in 1858. He then rose to leadership of a band of warriors by exhibiting extraordinary courage, determination and skill in successive raids of vengeance upon Mexicans. In 1874 some 4,000 Apaches were forcibly moved by U.S. authorities to a reservation at san Carlos, a barren wasteland in east central Arizona. Deprived of traditional tribal rights, short on rations, and homesick, they turned to Geronimo and others who led them in the depredations that plunged the region into turmoil and bloodshed.
In the early 1870's Lieutenant Colonel George F Crook, commander of the Department of Arizona, had succeeded in establishing relative peace in the territory. The management of his successors, however, was disastrous, and spurred by Geronimo, hundreds of Apaches left the reservation to resume their war against the whites. In 1882 Crook was recalled to Arizona to conduct a campaign against the Indians. Geronimo surrendered in January 1884, only to take flight from the San Carlos reservation in May 1885, accompanied by 35 men, 8 boys and 101 women. Crook threw his best men into the campaign, and 10 months later, on March 27 1886, Geronimo surrendered at Canon de Los Embudos in Sonora. Near the border, however, fearing that they would be murdered once they crossed into U.S. territory, Geronimo and a small band bolted. As a result, Brigadier General Nelson A. Miles replaced Crook as commander on April 2 1886.
During this campaign no fewer than 5,000 white soldiers and 500 Indian auxiliaries were employed at various times in the apprehension of Geronimo's small band. Five months and 1,645 miles later, Geronimo was tracked to his camp in the Sonora mountains. At a conference on September 3, 1886 at skeleton canyon in Arizona, Miles induced Geronimo
to surrender once again, promising him that, after an indefinate exile in Florida, he and his followers would be

permitted to return to Arizona. The promise was not kept. Geronimo and his fellow prisoners were put at hard labour and it was May 1887 before he saw his family. Moved to Fort Still, in Oklahoma territory, in 1894, he at first attempted to "take the white mans road". He farmed and joined the dutch reformed church, which expelled him for his inability to resist gambling. He never saw Arizona again, but by special permission of the war department, he was allowed to sell photographs of himself and his handiwork at expositions. Before he died, dictated to S.S. Barrett his autobiography, Geronimo: His Own Story

SUNDANCE KID, an American outlaw, reputed to be the best shot and fastest gunslinger of the wild buch, a group of robbers and rustlers who ranged through the rocky mountains and playeau desert regions of the West in the 1880's and 90's
Harry Longabaugh left home when he was 15 and took his nickname from the town of sundance, where he was imprisoned (for his first and only time) from August 1887 to February 1889 for stealing a horse. After release he headed for the hideout of Hole in the Wall in central Wyoming and began his outlaw career.

At the turn of the century, the Sundance Kid joined with Butch Cassidy and a girlfriend, Etta Place, and in 1901 drifted to New York City and then to South America, where they set up ranching in Chubut province, Argentina. In 1906 he and Cassidy returned to outlawry, robbing banks, trains and mining interests in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Peru (Sundance escorted the ailing Etta Place back to the United States in 1907 but then returned to South America)

In 1901, according to Pinkerton accounts, the two outlaws were cornered by a Bolivian Cavalry unit; Sundance was mortally wounded, and Cassidy took his own life. Another story puts their death at a bank robbery in Mercedes, Uruguay, in 1911; still other stories have Sundance surviving and returning to the United States and dying under obscurity under a new name (Harry Long) somwhere in the West (perhaps Casper, Wyoming) in the later 1930's or as late as 1957.