The Story of the Outlaw: A Study of the Western Desperado

Before passing to the review of the more modern days of wild life on the Western frontier, we shall find it interesting to note a period less known, but quite as wild and desper...

The entire history of the American frontier is one of rebellion against the law, if, indeed, that may be called rebellion whose apostles have not yet recognized any authority of...

Outlawry of the early border, in days before any pretense at establishment of a system of law and government, and before the holding of property had assumed any very stable form...

In the month of May, 1886, the writer was one of a party of buffalo-hunters bound for the Neutral Strip and the Panhandle of Texas, where a small number of buffalo still remaine...

The desert regions of the West seemed always to breed truculence and touchiness. Some of the most desperate outlaws have been those of western Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Th...

A review of the story of the American desperado will show that he has always been most numerous at the edge of things, where there was a frontier, a debatable ground between civ...

The world will never see another California. Great gold stampedes there may be, but under conditions far different from those of 1849. Transportation has been so developed, trav...

What is true for Texas, in the record of desperadoism, is equally applicable to the country adjoining Texas upon the north, long known under the general title of the Indian Nati...

Henry Plummer was for several years in the early '60's the "chief" of the widely extended band of robbers and murderers who kept the placer-mining fields of Montana and Idaho in...

The deeds of the Western sheriff have for the most part gone unchronicled, or have luridly been set forth in fiction as incidents of blood, interesting only because of their blo...

As has been shown in preceding chapters, the Western plains were passed over and left unsettled until the advent of the railroads, which began to cross the plains coincident wit...

Energy and action may be of two sorts, good or bad; this being as well as we can phrase it in human affairs. The live wires that net our streets are more dangerous than all the...

There was once a vast empire, almost unknown, west of the Missouri river. The white civilization of this continent was three hundred years in reaching it. We had won our indepen...

One pronounced feature of early Western life will have been remarked in the story of the mountain settlements with which we have been concerned, and that is the transient and mi...

Henry Plummer was what might be called a good instance of the gentleman desperado, if such a thing be possible; a man of at least a certain amount of refinement, and certainly o...

The history of the border wars on the American frontier, where the fighting was more like battle than murder, and where the extent of the crimes against law became too large for...

One of the best-known desperadoes the West ever produced was Joseph A. Slade, agent of the Overland stage line on the central or mountain division, about 1860, and hence in char...

It was stated early in these pages that the great cities and the great wildernesses are the two homes for bold crimes; but we have been most largely concerned with the latter in...

Next to the fight of Wild Bill with the McCandlas gang, the fight of Buckshot Roberts at Blazer's Mill, on the Mescalero Indian reservation, is perhaps the most remarkable comba...

There is always a grim sort of curiosity regarding the way in which notoriously desperate men meet their end; and perhaps this is as natural as is the curiosity regarding the ma...

The counterfeit bad man, in so far as he has a place in literature, was largely produced by Western consumptives for Eastern consumption. Sometimes he was in person manufactured...

The greatest of American gold stampedes, and perhaps the greatest of the world, not even excepting that of Australia, was that following upon the discovery of gold in California...