Outlaws & Gunslingers

Tales from the American Wild West

[Outlaws & Gunslingers @OutlawsAndGuns]

Welcome to Outlaws & Gunslingers!

I've always been fascinated with the American Wild West.

As a boy, I devoured every book and watched every Western I could find.

Why is my profile picture Buffalo Bill Cody?

From the 1880s into the 1900s, he kept these stories alive with his Wild West show long after the frontier was gone.

I hope to do the same with this account.

Saddle up!

[Outlaws & Gunslingers @OutlawsAndGuns]

A young photographer rode with Montana's buffalo hunters and took pictures no one could ever take again.

His name was L.A. Huffman. At 25 he became post photographer at Fort Keogh, the Army post built after Custer's defeat.

The job paid nothing. The Army gave him a dirt-floor log cabin for a studio and a home.

But he hustled, ranching cattle, guiding hunters, and riding the open range with a homemade camera and glass plates packed on horseback.

In winter he went out with the hide hunters and photographed them skinning buffalo in the snow. No other photos like them are known from the Northern Plains.

He also captured a camp of teepees made of buffalo hide, maybe the last ever photographed.

After 1883, the great herds were gone.

But L.A. Huffman had captured them forever.

[Outlaws & Gunslingers @OutlawsAndGuns]

@TheEagleyeNews The Wild West was crazy.

[Outlaws & Gunslingers @OutlawsAndGuns]

An outlaw was killed in 1911, and his body was still on display 65 years later.

His name was Elmer McCurdy, and he was a terrible train robber. In Oklahoma, he stopped the wrong train and got away with $46 and two jugs of whiskey.

Days later, a posse shot the bandit dead in a hayloft.

Nobody claimed the body. The undertaker embalmed it with arsenic and charged a nickel to see "The Embalmed Bandit."

Five years later, two carnival men posing as McCurdy's brothers took him away. The dead outlaw spent decades as a sideshow attraction.

In 1976, a TV crew filming The Six Million Dollar Man in a Long Beach funhouse grabbed a hanging dummy. Its arm broke off, and a human bone stuck out.

Oklahoma finally buried him in 1977. According to legend, they poured two feet of concrete over the coffin to keep anyone from taking him again.

Happy Halloween.

[Outlaws & Gunslingers @OutlawsAndGuns]

In 1881, a Wyoming doctor had a pair of shoes made from an outlaw's skin.

The outlaw was Big Nose George Parrott. His gang had killed two lawmen after a failed train robbery, and he was sentenced to hang.

Days before the hanging, he sawed through his leg irons and struck the jailer's head with them. The jailer's wife stopped the escape. Soon after, a mob dragged George from his cell and lynched him from a telegraph pole.

Two doctors claimed the body. One of them, John Osborne, made a death mask of the outlaw's face, then had the skin tanned and made into shoes.

According to the story, the doctor wore them to his inauguration as governor of Wyoming. Later he kept them in a glass case in a Rawlins bank lobby.

Scientists examined the shoes in 1995. The skin was human.

[Outlaws & Gunslingers @OutlawsAndGuns]

Bodie, California, is one of the best-preserved ghost towns in the American West.

The town was named for W.S. Bodey, a prospector who found gold near Mono Lake in 1859. That November, he set out for supplies and died in a blizzard, long before the town was ever built.

For years, his strike drew only a handful of miners. Then a rich vein turned up in the late 1870s, and the sleepy camp exploded.

Soon some 8,000 people crowded into town. Dozens of saloons lined Main Street. Shootings, stabbings and stagecoach holdups got so common that "a bad man from Bodie" became slang across the West.

According to legend, one little girl heard her family was moving there and wrote in her diary, "Goodbye God, I'm going to Bodie."

The gold ran out. The miners moved on, and two great fires burned most of what was left.

Today, the town stands silent at 8,379 feet, with goods still on the store shelves where the last residents left them.

Pictured: Bodie around 1890, and the same town today.

[Outlaws & Gunslingers @OutlawsAndGuns]

@HeloTrooper This is AI slop

[Outlaws & Gunslingers @OutlawsAndGuns]

@grok @wrogebama I don’t make things up on this account.

[Outlaws & Gunslingers @OutlawsAndGuns]

@MemoryMedieval That is a mighty fine mustache

[Outlaws & Gunslingers @OutlawsAndGuns]

@Sartronulous He was shot by a ranger during the shootout. He died from the wound.

[Outlaws & Gunslingers @OutlawsAndGuns]

In 1878, Sam Bass came to Round Rock, Texas, to rob the bank, but one of his men had already sold him out to the Texas Rangers.

The outlaw's gang had robbed four trains near Dallas that spring. The Rangers caught one of them, Jim Murphy, and he agreed to betray his boss to save his own neck.

The day before the planned holdup, Bass and two partners stopped in a store near the bank. A deputy sheriff who spotted a pistol followed them in. The bandits shot him dead.

One Ranger ran from a barber's chair with lather still on his face. The wounded outlaw escaped with a partner holding him in the saddle.

The next morning, lawmen found him hiding in a pasture north of town. Sam Bass refused to name his friends and died on his 27th birthday.

His sister later put a stone on his grave. It read: "A brave man reposes in death here. Why was he not true?"

Pictured: Sam Bass (standing, left) with fellow outlaws, 1876.

[Outlaws & Gunslingers @OutlawsAndGuns]

@pbkid22 You should consider growing out a mustache like him.

[Outlaws & Gunslingers @OutlawsAndGuns]

Wild Bill Hickok never sat with his back to a door, until one afternoon in 1876.

No gunfighter in the West was more famous. He had been an Army scout and a lawman in the rough Kansas cow towns, and plenty of men wanted him dead.

That summer, Wild Bill sat down to play poker at the No. 10 Saloon in Deadwood, a lawless gold camp in the Black Hills.

His usual seat against the wall was taken. Twice he asked the gambler in it to switch. The other players laughed it off, so he took the open stool, his back to the rear door.

Three hours later, a drifter named Jack McCall walked in and fired a pistol into the back of his head.

The gunslinger was 39.

A miners' court set the killer free the next day. A real court later sent McCall to the gallows.

According to legend, the cards Wild Bill was holding were a pair of black aces and a pair of black eights. They are still called the Dead Man's Hand today.

[Outlaws & Gunslingers @OutlawsAndGuns]

@HistoryWJacob Coffeyville, Kansas, 1892. The Dalton Gang tried to rob two banks at once. The townsfolk grabbed rifles from the hardware store and beat the most feared gang in the West in 12 minutes.

[Outlaws & Gunslingers @OutlawsAndGuns]

@ChiewPan43382 Howdy there!

[Outlaws & Gunslingers @OutlawsAndGuns]

Welcome to Outlaws & Gunslingers!

I've always been fascinated with the American Wild West.

As a boy, I devoured every book and watched every Western I could find.

Why is my profile picture Buffalo Bill Cody?

From the 1880s into the 1900s, he kept these stories alive with his Wild West show long after the frontier was gone.

I hope to do the same with this account.

Saddle up!

[Outlaws & Gunslingers @OutlawsAndGuns]

@RationalVo1ce Fastest draw in the West, partner

[Outlaws & Gunslingers @OutlawsAndGuns]

@WileECitizen It looks like you had a great childhood!

[Outlaws & Gunslingers @OutlawsAndGuns]

@TheEagleyeNews Congratulations!

[Outlaws & Gunslingers @OutlawsAndGuns]

@BedfordBrand I reckon that’ll be a nice read.

[Outlaws & Gunslingers @OutlawsAndGuns]

@fearnothing I’ll try not to disappoint!

[Outlaws & Gunslingers @OutlawsAndGuns]

@MemoryMedieval Woah, thank you!!!