Outlaws of the Old West

The Event: Classic era of Western outlaws

Date: c. 1850–1890

Significance: Lack of efficient law enforcement in pioneering communities and the promise of easy wealth fostered lawlessness and vigilante justice on America’s last frontier.

The classic era of the Wild West—roughly the latter half of the nineteenth century—has captured the imaginations of Americans since the very years in which it unfolded. Bandits such as Jesse James and Billy the Kid and female criminals such as Belle Starr and Pearl Hart have become American icons who have inspired countless novels, plays, and films that have transformed their criminal careers into romantic folklore.

The last major American frontier was opened to eastern settlers and European immigrants in 1862, when the federal government made land available through the Homestead Act. The California gold rush of the late 1840s and 1850s had already attracted a flood of get-rich-quick hopefuls into California and the Oregon Territory. After 1856, new mining camps sprang up in response to major silver strikes in southern Arizona. In Texas and New Mexico, cattle ranchers were kings; cowboys drove herds of thousands of cattle to shipping towns such as Dodge City, Kansas, which relayed beef to eastern markets. In 1889 the federal government opened up much of the Indian Territory—later known as Oklahoma—to settlers. By 1890, most of the land in the West was owned by settlers, Indian nations, or the federal government, and the frontier was effectively closed.

Frontier Law Enforcement

While the Western frontier remained open, criminality flourished. The area was vast, law-enforcement officials were both few and poorly trained, and the few court systems lacked resources. Municipal constables, sheriffs, and federal marshals commonly had no training other than what they learned on their own; many even had to provide their own weapons and horses. Basic tools for lawyers and magistrates, such as law books containing statutes and codes for the nascent Western states and territories were hard to find.

Courts were administered by justices of the peace, many of whom were untrained magistrates elected from pools of local townspeople. One such magistrate who won fame was Texas’s Judge Roy Bean, who was notorious for making rulings in his saloon that were supported by his single law book and pistol.

Politics also often played a part in the frontier’s lack of justice. Since sheriffs and marshals were often appointed or elected, they generally avoided doing things that might upset voters—including those who were not law-abiding citizens. Cattle rustlers, horse thieves, cardsharps, highwaymen, and bank and train robbers often escaped conviction in the sparsely inhabited frontier.

Frustrated by lawless conditions, settlers and prospectors sometimes took the law into their own hands, forming vigilante groups that captured and summarily executed larcenous bandits. Lawmen were rarely able to charge the vigilante groups with crimes because their members scattered or kept silent. By contrast, citizens often deemed desperadoes heroes, especially if their targets were unpopular rich ranchers or companies such as Wells Fargo or the Union Pacific Railroad. Legends grew around these ostensible Robin Hoods, who purportedly stole from the rich and gave to the poor. Many were immortalized through folk songs and other popular media, and their appeal as cultural figures remains intact in the twenty-first century. Among the most famous are Jesse James and Billy the Kid.

The James-Younger Gang

One of the most celebrated criminal gangs of the Old West was the James-Younger gang, which was led by Jesse and Frank James, two brothers from Missouri. After the Civil War broke out in 1861, Frank joined a band of Confederate guerrillas who terrorized Union sympathizers in Missouri, a southern state that never declared for the Confederacy. Sixteen-year-old Jesse also signed up after a band of Union militia tortured him and his parents on their farm. The war taught him the power of brutality.

After the war ended in 1865 making the transition from military raiding to criminal raiding and robbery was easy for the James brothers and their partners, Cole Younger and three of his brothers. The gang’s first recorded robbery took place at a Gallatin, Missouri, bank in December, 1869. They stole seven hundred dollars and killed a clerk. Although one of the gang’s horses was traced back to Jesse James’s home, Jesse and Frank managed to escape. It began a pattern that would continue through the next decade: Jesse and his gang outsmarted the authorities and eluded capture by coercing guides or circling behind posses. They robbed banks and trains—both seen by many locals as reprehensible symbols of Yankee domination—in six states and found refuge within a support network that stretched from the James family’s farm to Indian Territory. Not even the famed Pinkerton Detective Agency, whose men had captured train robbers in the past, could foil the James-Younger gang.

Even though the James-Younger gang often shot unarmed bank clerks and train engineers, the public hailed its members as bandit heroes above the law. In July 1876, however, the gang’s unraveling began with a bloody failed bank robbery in Northfield, Minnesota, that left a bank employee and an innocent bystander dead. Three members of the gang were killed and the Youngers were captured. Only the James brothers got away. In 1881 the brothers had a new gang, with which they robbed a Kansas City train. In the process, they shot a conductor in the back and killed an elderly railroad man—both crimes that turned the public against them. Nevertheless, the James brothers may have continued to elude the law had not Bob Ford, a member of their own gang, assassinated Jesse James in 1882 after being promised clemency.

Billy the Kid

Born Henry McCarty in 1859, Billy the Kid was a legend during a lifetime that lasted not quite twenty-two years. In New Mexico he fell in with a group of petty thieves and was caught stealing a Chinese man’s clothes. After escaping from jail by climbing up through a chimney, he fled to Arizona. In mining camps there he gambled and dealt cards, but it was stealing horses at which he excelled.

Horse thieves were particularly reviled criminals on the frontier because horses were always in short supply and needed by farmers, ranchers, lawmen, and others alike. Private citizens thought it their right to capture, try, and hang horse thieves without involving the law. Billy the Kid soon left horse thieving for cowboy work and became involved in a deadly feud between ranchers. When his boss was assassinated in 1878, Billy vowed revenge. After he was deputized, he and his companions, known as the Regulators, hunted down and killed two of the alleged assassins. Two months later, they gunned down the county sheriff.

Billy then fled and returned to horse and cattle rustling. However, he grew tired of being a fugitive and asked New Mexico’s governor for a pardon in exchange for his testimony about the sheriff’s murder. Thinking that he and the governor had struck a deal, he eventually testified; however, he was jailed and tried in a federal district court. He was convicted of murder and scheduled to hang, but he killed the deputies guarding him and escaped. After the government issued a five-hundred-dollar reward for Billy’s capture, the new sheriff, Patrick Garrett, caught up with him and shot him to death. Like Jesse James, Billy the Kid was seen more as a folk hero than as a criminal by many people.

Bibliography

Butler, Anne M. Gendered Justice in the American West: Women Prisoners in Men’s Penitentiaries. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Print.

Hough, Emerson. The Story of the Outlaw: A Study of the Western Desperado. Lanham, Md.: Cooper Square Publishers, 2001. Print.

Metz, Leon Claire. The Encyclopedia of Lawmen, Outlaws, and Gunfighters. New York: Facts On File, 2002. Print.

Nash, Jay Robert. Encyclopedia of Western Lawmen and Outlaws. New York: Da Capo Press, 1994. Print.

Tuska, Jon. Billy the Kid: His Life and Legend. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994. Print.