r/WildWestPics • u/Tryingagain1979 • 1d ago
r/WildWestPics • u/meguskus • Oct 06 '22
META Note from the mods: Please refrain from speculation and fiction
A healthy discussion is great, but there's been a lot of speculation popping up, especially about Billy the Kid. Asking people if they think someone looks similar is not really a fruitful discussion, it's completely subjective and baseless. If it's of any legitimacy, send the source to an actual historian. We do not want to accidentally spread misinfo.
r/WildWestPics • u/Tryingagain1979 • 2d ago
Photograph On this date in 1889, homesteaders Ella Watson and James Averell are murdered by Wyoming ranchers.
Ella Watson "Cattle Kate" c. 1880's
r/WildWestPics • u/Tryingagain1979 • 3d ago
Photograph On this date in 1879, Doc Holliday killed for the first time.
r/WildWestPics • u/KidCharlem • 6d ago
The Legend Maker: Ned Buntline, the man who discovered Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack and invented the Western, died 140 years ago today.
Edward Zane Carroll Judson died of heart failure at 4:20 in the afternoon on July 16, 1886 — one hundred and forty years ago today — at Eagle's Nest, his twenty-room mansion in the Catskills above Stamford, New York. The funeral two days later was the largest the village had ever seen. The New York Times counted more than eight hundred mourners. Special trains ran on the Ulster and Delaware to bring them in. Nearly two hundred Grand Army of the Republic men marched in the procession, and behind the casket walked one of Judson's Hambletonian horses, saddle empty, boots reversed in the stirrups. The man in the coffin was better known to the mourners, and to a few million American readers, as Ned Buntline.

The eulogies were barely finished before the letters started arriving at the Delaware County Surrogate's Court. The first came the day after he died, from a Westchester attorney representing a Mrs. Kate Judson, who claimed to be his widow and the mother of four of his children. Another followed on behalf of a woman he'd married in 1847. Within two weeks a third claimant arrived in Stamford in person, by borrowed carriage, to press her case against the widow actually living at Eagle's Nest. The Times put it on the front page: "Ned Buntline's Estate: Two Widows in the Field for the Property." The paper undercounted. Buntline had married at least nine women, and had not always troubled himself to unmarry one before wedding the next.

We'll come back to the widows. First I want to go back thirteen and a half years, to a hotel room in Chicago, because the thing Ned Buntline is remembered for, to the extent he's remembered at all, happened there in the span of about four hours.
In December of 1872, Buntline convinced two working plainsmen to meet him in Chicago and become actors. William F. Cody was a twenty-six-year-old Army scout Buntline had met at Fort McPherson in the summer of 1869 and had been writing into serialized heroics ever since, starting with Buffalo Bill, the King of the Border Men. John B. Omohundro, "Texas Jack," was Cody's friend and fellow scout at McPherson, a Virginia cavalryman turned Texas cowboy turned government scout. Neither man had ever stood on a stage.

Buntline had promised Chicago theater manager Jim Nixon a spectacle: real scouts, real Indians, a real border drama. Cody and Omohundro arrived without the Indians Buntline might not have ever even suggested they bring, and when Nixon asked to see the script, Buntline admitted there wasn't one. It was Thursday. The opening was scheduled for Monday. Buntline hired local actors to paint up as the missing warriors, found a famous Italian prima ballerina willing to lower herself to perform with non-actors, herded his scouts to a hotel, called for pen and paper, and wrote The Scouts of the Prairie in, by his own boast, four hours. They rehearsed it twice.
Cody left us an account of the study session that followed, the two most famous frontiersmen in America hunched over their parts like schoolboys. "How long will it take to commit your part to memory, Bill?" Jack asked. "About six months, as near as I can calculate," Cody answered. "How long will it take you?" Jack replied, "It will take me about that length of time to learn the first line." When Buntline coached them to stop at the cue, Cody protested that he'd never seen a cue outside a billiard room.

None of that mattered.
On December 16, 1872, at Nixon's Amphitheater, the curtain rose on a full house, Cody went blank with stage fright, Buntline, wearing a wig and playing a temperance-sermonizing mountain-man trapper named Cale Durg, fed him prompts disguised as dialogue, Buffalo Bill told them about a hunt he and Jack had done earlier that summer instead, Texas Jack yelled out that they were under attack by Indians an act or two too early, and the audience roared anyway.
The Chicago Times pronounced the evening a combination of "incongruous drama, execrable acting, renowned performers, mixed audience, intolerable stench, scalping, blood and thunder" the likes of which the city would never see again, and the paper was wrong within the week, because Nixon added performances and sold out every one. The critics savaged the play in every city it touched — a New York reviewer doubted any other man alive could write such execrable stuff — and every city it touched filled the house. The public had not come for a play. They had come to see two authentic heroes of the plains standing in the gaslight, and no review could touch that.
The show made Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack immediate national sensations, and it is not too much to say that a cornerstone of American entertainment — the Western, on stage and everything it would eventually become — starts that night.
Step back from the footlights and the critically panned blockbuster of a play consider for a moment the man who had written it. By 1872 Ned Buntline had been one of the most widely read authors in America for a quarter century. His story papers and dime novels, from sea yarns, city "mysteries and miseries," to border thrillers sold in numbers that rivaled or beat the literary lions of the age in raw contemporary readership. He was, by most scholarly reckonings, among the three or four most popular American fiction writers of his era. When Mark Twain wanted to show us what boys' imaginations were made of, he had Tom Sawyer play pirate as "the Black Avenger of the Spanish Main," the title role of a Ned Buntline blood-and-thunder from 1847. Twain didn't need to explain the reference. Every boy in America reading Tom Sawyer already knew it by heart. From Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain:
About midnight Tom arrived with a boiled ham and a few trifles, and stopped in a dense undergrowth on a small bluff overlooking the meeting-place. It was starlight, and very still. The mighty river lay like an ocean at rest. Tom listened a moment, but no sound disturbed the quiet. Then he gave a low, distinct whistle. It was answered from under the bluff. Tom whistled twice more; these signals were answered in the same way. Then a guarded voice said:
"Who goes there?”
“Tom Sawyer, the Black Avenger of the Spanish Main. Name your names.”
“Huck Finn the Red-Handed, and Joe Harper the Terror of the Seas.” Tom had furnished these titles, from his favorite literature.
Tom, Huck, and Joe as Buntline inspired pirates in Mark Twain's "Tom Sawyer."

Buntline himself was clear-eyed about what he made. He had started out with literary ambitions, he admitted late in life, and discovered that to make a living he must write "trash for the masses" — the writer who serves only the critical few, he said, will go hungry. He wrote his trash at industrial speed, sold it outright to his publishers, and never looked back at a page of it.
But the writing is only half the man, and even with stories of swashbuckling pirates and tales of the wild west, honestly the writing in this case may be the calmer half.
Trace Buntline's itinerary through the 1840s and 1850s and a pattern emerges: he arrives in a city, he rises fast, and he leaves under circumstances that make return inadvisable.
Nashville, 1845–46. Buntline, newly widowed and freshly failed as a magazine publisher, took up with Mary Porterfield, the nineteen-year-old wife of Robert Porterfield. When the rumors could no longer be ignored, Porterfield confronted him with a pistol on March 14, 1846, at Sulphur Spring, and fired three times. He missed. Buntline fired once and didn't. At the courthouse examination that night, Robert's brother John burst through the crowd firing a revolver; Buntline fled, took a bullet-graze across the scalp, ran to the third floor of the City Hotel, tried to shinny down a balcony post, slipped, and fell to the street, breaking a leg. Days later a mob broke into the jail, dragged him to the public square, put a noose around his neck, and threw the rope over an awning. The rope broke (cut, by some accounts, by a sympathizer) and the mob's appetite broke with it. No prosecutor ever appeared to try him for Porterfield's death. Buntline slipped out of Nashville by steamboat.

New York, 1849. Now editing Ned Buntline's Own and commanding one of the largest weekly circulations in the city, Buntline had refashioned himself as the loudest voice of the nativist movement, a political ideology that favored native-born Americans first, and damnation to foreign influence in politics, in the church, and, as it happened, on the stage. When the feud between the American actor Edwin Forrest and the English tragedian William Macready came to a head at the Astor Place Opera House on May 10, 1849, Buntline appointed himself field general. Witnesses put him at the center of the mob, calling out "Are there any Americans here?", proposing a fire be set at the rear of the theater, announcing himself by name as the nucleus the crowd was waiting for. The militia fired into that crowd. At least twenty-two people died, some accounts say more than thirty, with at least a few of the dead bystanders blocks away. Buntline was arrested raising a paving stone over his head, convicted of inciting the riot, and served a year on Blackwell's Island. When his sentence expired, his nativist brethren chartered a steamboat to fetch him, met him with a coach-and-four and a marching band, and paraded him through the streets. "It is supposed," one paper observed, "that after his decease he will be canonized."

He converted the celebrity directly into a lecture tour, charging twenty-five cents a head to hear Ned Buntline rail against Catholics and immigrants, delivered in a coat hung with medals of dubious merit, with a brass band behind playing him. The tour took him west, preaching the American Party gospel down the Mississippi Valley, and in April 1852 it delivered him to St. Louis on election day, where he led a nativist mob through the German wards in an attempt to suppress non-American born voters. A saloon was burned with the keeper's wife and newborn carried out on a mattress; a young fireman named Joseph Stephens was shot dead; and a telegram went out over the national wires reporting that Ned Buntline had a horse killed under him and "acted like a man," which as a dispatch reads suspiciously as if its hero composed it himself.
Indicted for instigating the riot, Buntline made his bail, married a Mormon farmer's daughter across the river in Illinois while the court dates were postponed, and in January 1853, when the case was finally called, simply failed to appear. His friends forfeited their bonds and Ned Buntline once again moved on.

A nativist demagogue with a genius for self-promotion; a man who discovered that outrage and celebrity are the same currency, and spent freely in both; a hypocrite who preached morality; a leader of riots who blamed everyone but himself; a man whose supporters greeted his release from prison with a parade. I describe the 1850s. Any instances of history repeating itself is purely coincidental.
But here's the thing about jumping bail: the paperwork keeps. Twenty years after that St. Louis no-show, The Scouts of the Prairie rolled into St. Louis on its first triumphant tour, and on Christmas Eve 1872 a deputy marshal walked into the company's hotel and arrested the playwright. Cody and Omohundro found the whole thing more comic than alarming. "If we were out on the plains, we might have something to say," Texas Jack observed, "but here in the city it is no use. We must take what comes." A banker friend posted Buntline's bond in time for him to limp into the first act that same night at the St. Louis Opera House.

The tour rolled on, to Cincinnati and Cleveland and Pittsburgh and on east through the great houses of the seaboard, Niblo's Garden in New York packed past its thirty-five-hundred capacity — and it made everyone money, though as with everything in Buntline's orbit, exactly how much and exactly where it went are questions the principals answered differently ever after.
And then, having built the most successful theatrical novelty in America, Buntline lost it in a single summer.
The Buntline edition of the Scouts lasted exactly one dramatic season: December 16, 1872, in Chicago, Illinois, to June 28, 1873 in Port Jervis, New York. And it's clear Buntline expected a second. As late as the end of June and into July, he was running notices in the New York dramatic papers addressed "TO MANAGERS," announcing that his "immensely successful play, THE PRAIRIE SCOUTS," together with a new drama of border life titled TEXAS JACK, "will be produced with the real heroes and a fresh corps of Indian braves, fresh from the Plains, during the fall and winter season in the United States, prior to an extended European tour." Buffalo Bill, Texas Jack, Ned Buntline, and "a corps of the first actors and actresses in America" would fill the roles. Managers were to send dates and offers at once to Col. E. Z. C. Judson, Box 4,896, New York City.

It seems the real heroes had other plans. Back in Nebraska for the summer, Cody and Omohundro told the Omaha Evening Bee (in an article that ran July 28, 1873, while Buntline's notices were still soliciting bookings) that the scouts had "dissolved partnership with Ned Buntline, and will now go it alone. The boys think they have made enough money for other people, and now propose to paddle their own canoe. They have learned the eastern country and the ways of the world sufficiently to hereafter be their own guides." The item added that on the contemplated European trip the scouts would be accompanied by James B. Hickok, "the original 'Wild Bill'," and while Europe never happened, Hickok did indeed join his old friends on the boards that fall, in the scouts' own production, under the scouts' own management.

There's a poetry in the Bee's phrasing that no one seems to have planned. Two scouts, men whose profession was guiding others through country they didn't know, had just spent a season being guided through the theatrical East, and now judged themselves competent enough to serve as their own guides. They were right. The combination Cody and Omohundro ran without Buntline toured successfully for years, split amicably into two stars' separate companies, and led, after Texas Jack's death in Leadville in 1880, to the outdoor spectacle Cody launched in 1883 as the Wild West. Buntline, for his part, cobbled together a rival troupe with hired actors and Barnum's Indians and worked the smaller towns his former stars skipped. It lost money. The audiences knew what the critics never grasped: the words were replaceable. The men saying them were not.
What Buntline apparently never did was turn on them. Five years after the split, in the October 31, 1878, issue of Forest and Stream, the old showman weighed in on a sporting debate — whether long-range target shooting at the fashionable ranges actually unfitted a rifleman for quick, open work on game — and reached for his old costar to settle it. He never knew a first-class target shot worth a blessing after deer, elk, or antelope, he wrote, and offered a wager: "I'll put 'Texas Jack' against Mr. Hyde or Mr. Partello on the plains, and he will kill two to their one all the time, or more game on the same ground than both of them put together." He signed it E. Z. C. J.

Consider what that is. Charles E. Hyde and Dwight W. Partello were two of the most celebrated marksmen in the world, the Creedmoor medal-winners of the sporting press. And here is Ned Buntline, the man Texas Jack had walked away from, the man whose second season died in the dramatic columns, telling a national sporting audience that his old scout would outshoot both of them on the same ground. Whatever Buntline was, and he was a great many things, he was not small about the men he had put on stage.
The standard scholarly corrective on Buntline comes from Don Russell, whose landmark Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill set out to deflate the notion that Buntline invented Buffalo Bill. Russell's facts are sound: Buntline's total output of Buffalo Bill dime novels was four; he didn't coin the nickname; Cody had a genuine and distinguished record as a scout that owed nothing to any writer; the discovery at Fort McPherson was, as Russell has it, quite coincidental. Cody himself, late in life, told an interviewer that Buntline had done him harm as much as good, painting him as a wholesale killer of Indians and cheapening him "in the estimation of people worth knowing."

All of that is true, and all of it is beside the point. Yes, others wrote far more Buffalo Bill than Buntline ever did. Prentiss Ingraham alone may have contributed more to the printed legend than any man living. But inasmuch as "Buffalo Bill" the character and William F. Cody the man can be separated, "Buffalo Bill" is a Ned Buntline story. Saying otherwise is like saying Arthur Conan Doyle didn't contribute much to the film and television legacy of Sherlock Holmes. Sure. But it misses the point. If William F. Cody and John B. Omohundro hadn't existed, Buntline couldn't have made "Buffalo Bill" and "Texas Jack" sensations. But if Buntline hadn't written them into his stories and then taken them onto the stage, they'd number among the countless other possibly extraordinary, but ultimately unremembered, men and women who lived and died in the West.
Cody, whatever he told interviewers, seems to have understood the ledger. Asked about Buntline after the old man's death, he defended him: "He was extremely patriotic, and had great love of his country — and from what I know of him I would say that he deserved well of our nation as much so as any who took up arms in its defense."
Which brings us back to Stamford, and the widows.
The mourners who trudged up to Eagle's Nest after the burial had every reason to assume the man they mourned had amassed a sizable fortune. Buntline had earned, by the common estimate, an average of twenty thousand dollars a year for decades. Just for some context, $20,000 in 1886, the year Buntline died, is around $715,000 in 2026. In 1847, the year his Black Avenger was published, it's closer to $820,000. But the estate the widows fought over barely existed. Anna, the wife at his deathbed, testified there was no personal property to speak of; she had to borrow from friends just to pay for the funeral. The life insurance policy listed in his will turned out to be imaginary. The pension application he'd finally signed a week before his death, after years of loudly refusing to become "a government pauper," was denied, and the hundreds of pages of the pension file thereafter record the government's decade-long attempt to sort out which of the marriages counted. None of the wives or children ever collected a cent.

And here's the detail that closes the circle: his family couldn't profit from his writing either, because there was nothing to inherit. Buntline had sold every story outright to his publishers, wholesale, rights and all. The houses could reprint his work forever, retitle it, even reissue it under other men's names, and owed the Judson estate nothing. The man received no royalties on any character he ever created — not the Black Avenger, not Buffalo Bill, not Texas Jack.
Sit with that a moment. Ned Buntline wrote several hundred, perhaps more than a thousand, novels and owned none of them. He created the two founding celebrities of the Western entertainment tradition and held no rights to either. Every property he ever generated slipped through his hands — sold cheap, signed away, or forfeited like a St. Louis bail bond. The one thing he made that could not be sold, reprinted under a house title, or contested by widows was the one thing that outlived everything else: that one December night in Chicago when he put two real plainsmen in front of the footlights and let America look at them.
The play was written in four hours and forgotten in a season. What walked out on that stage is still with us. When Buffalo Bill's Wild West filled its grandstands, when the cowboy rode into the nickelodeon and then the movie palace and then the living room, all of it descended from the sensation Ned Buntline manufactured out of Cody and Omohundro in December 1872, and by June 1873 it was a sensation that no longer needed him. He learned the same lesson every showman since has had to learn about authenticity: you can write it a script, you can market the hell out of it, you can make a fortune on its merits, but you can't keep it under contract.
He died one hundred and forty years ago today, and eight hundred people came to watch him buried behind a horse with empty boots turned backward in the stirrups. It was a fine piece of staging. Easy to think it would have made Ned Buntline proud.
Today, Ned Buntline is remembered, when he's remembered at all, as the man who discovered Buffalo Bill. That's completely accurate, and it is accurate beyond any argument. What he should be remembered for is the thing he created and then couldn't hold on to. Because, yes, Ned Buntline wrote Buffalo Bill, the King of the Border Men. Yes, he wrote Texas Jack, the White King of the Pawnees. And yes, he wrote The Black Avenger of the Spanish Main; or, The Fiend of Blood. But what he created — the gumbo he stirred up when he combined elements from his dime novel stories, his temperance lectures, an Italian ballerina dressed as a Native American princess, a scout named Buffalo Bill, and a cowboy named Texas Jack — was the western.
Full stop.

For the fullest modern accounting of Buntline's life — the nine marriages, the pension file, the riots, and the strange machinery of his celebrity — I recommend my friend Julia Bricklin's wonderful biography, The Notorious Life of Ned Buntline: A Tale of Murder, Betrayal, and the Creation of Buffalo Bill, on which portions of this essay heavily rely.
r/WildWestPics • u/goodmedicinegal • 7d ago
Photograph A Pawnee scout pictured in partial dress by William Henry Jackson (1868)
r/WildWestPics • u/Tryingagain1979 • 8d ago
Photograph On this date in 1882, Johnny Ringo was found dead in Arizona Territory.
r/WildWestPics • u/Tryingagain1979 • 10d ago
Photograph On this date in 1861, Wild Bill Hickok’s first gunfight takes place.
Following a spring 1861 business dispute and personal clash with his stock tender, James Butler Hickok, David McCanles confronted Rock Creek Station occupants for payment on July 12, 1861, resulting in a fatal shootout where a concealed Hickok killed McCanles and wounded his two associates.
r/WildWestPics • u/Tryingagain1979 • 12d ago
Photograph On this date in 1889, 'Buckskin' Frank Leslie murdered his lover.
r/WildWestPics • u/Tryingagain1979 • 14d ago
Photograph On this date in 1898, con man “Soapy” Smith was killed in Skagway, Alaska.
galleryr/WildWestPics • u/Tryingagain1979 • 16d ago
Photograph On this date in 1900, Warren Earp, the youngest of the Earps, was murdered in an Arizona saloon.
r/WildWestPics • u/Tryingagain1979 • 19d ago
Photograph On this date in 1887, gunfighter Clay Allison was killed. The notorious gunfighter died on July 3, 1887, when he fell from a freight wagon and the wheel ran over his neck.
r/WildWestPics • u/baveskollebr • 21d ago
Chung Own, Dealer in Chinese Merchandise. (Virginia City, MT, c. 1896-1905)
r/WildWestPics • u/Tryingagain1979 • 27d ago
Artwork On this date in 1876, Native American forces led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull defeat the U.S. Army troops of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer in the Battle of the Little Bighorn near southern Montana’s Little Bighorn River.
r/WildWestPics • u/KidCharlem • Jun 12 '26
Photograph Texas Jack Junior - Newly Uncovered Photograph
On an afternoon in the middle of August 1887, a Liverpool police constable (number 925, the record keeps him that anonymous) arrested a cowboy in Whitechapel and marched him, along with his horse, to the main bridewell. The horse was the charge: the mustang had been ridden through the streets with an unhealed wound festering under the saddle, and the constable meant to have its rider up for cruelty. At the bridewell, though, the officials ran into a difficulty they were not used to. They were accustomed, the Liverpool Daily Post observed, to booking even the wildest roughs of North Liverpool, and those at least came provided with a family name of some sort. This prisoner had none. His parents, it was explained, had been slaughtered in his infancy by Indians, and the nomenclature of the Far West ran to fanciful titles and soubriquets rather than to homely surnames. After "considerable difficulty," the clerk wrote into the charge-book the only name anyone could supply — Texas Jack — and the cowboy was let go on bail in his own recognizances.
A year or so later, and an ocean to the west, that same man walked into a photographer's studio on the Bowery in New York and sat for a photograph that has just resurfaced.
It turned up where these things turn up now, in an online auction. There, it is tipped into a plush Victorian photo album stamped Our Friends across the cover, among some thirty-odd cabinet cards whose mounts carry the imprints of studios in Milan, Ypsilanti, Saline, Tecumseh, and Detroit: the photographic furniture of an ordinary family in southeast Michigan. How a portrait of Texas Jack Junior came to rest among their friends and relations is anyone's guess. Performer cards circulated as collectibles, bought and traded the way later generations would collect film stars, and the likeliest answer is simply that someone in that household admired him. The album binding is later than the photograph, and the back of the card carries nothing but a penciled stock number and somebody's idle arithmetic. As far as I can find, the image has never been digitized or recorded anywhere. It appears to be new.
What it shows is a young man, dark hair to his shoulders, broad hat pushed back off his face, a kerchief knotted with a jeweled pin at his throat, a belt and a pair of holstered revolvers at his waist, arms folded, looking off past the camera against a studio sky of painted cloud. It's the standard frontier-idol pose of the period, and he wears it well. He looks, if anything, slightly indifferent.
The back of the mount names the studio: Wm. H. Saul, Photographer, No. 214 Bowery, New York. That one line dates the picture more tightly than almost any other surviving image of him. Saul kept his Bowery rooms only briefly. He is listed at 214 Bowery in the New York business directory for 1888, advertising both that address and a new uptown studio by 1890, and gone entirely to upper Manhattan by 1892.
The Bowery in those years was the cabinet-card district, thick with theatres and variety halls and the photographers who supplied their performers with portraits to sell; a touring Western act sitting for Saul is exactly what one would expect to find there. And the man can be placed in New York in precisely that window: on the 7th of February 1888 he landed there aboard the White Star liner Arabic, in from Liverpool, entered on the passenger manifest, of course, simply as "Texas Jack," occupation showman. The photograph belongs to that American interval, somewhere in 1888 or 1889, on the leg between his return from England and the day he set off from the other coast of America for the far side of the world. The camera caught him about a year out of the police court.
For the Liverpool he had just left was the making of him. Through 1886 and 1887 the Wild West show at the city's great Exhibition was not Buffalo Bill's but its rival's, Mexican Joe's, run by Colonel Joe Shelley, who had brought over his own troupe of cowboys and Indians to stage the thrilling frontier adventures the public could otherwise only read about. Texas Jack Junior was one of his featured hands.
A surviving concert-hall programme from the season bills "Texas Jack's Descriptive Song, and Manipulations of the Pistols" between the comic songs and the closing spectacle, a roping-and-shooting specialty turn, years before the South African outfit that would eventually bear his name and, through a young roper named Will Rogers, the legacy that would outlast it. The bill ended, as these bills did, on a reenactment: "The Camp of Chihuahua," a staged scene of Mexican Joe's own supposed capture by outlaws and his rescue, billed as "a picture true to life."
It was in the middle of that engagement that the horse put Junior in the dock. The case came up at the Dale Street police court before Mr. Clarke Aspinall, and it drew a crowd — partly for the novelty of the defendant, partly, one suspects, for the chance to hear him talk. The society's inspector and a veterinary surgeon swore the wounds beneath the girth were four or five days old.
Jack would have none of it. The horse, he said, was a wild Texas animal that had not been broken until that very week and had never been saddled until the day before; he could bring a hundred men to prove it, and besides which, he would hardly spoil his own stock on purpose. Then, with the magistrate proposing to adjourn so the defense could gather witnesses, he delivered the line that makes the whole record worth keeping. He would rather, he told the bench, pay five dollars now than be detained. "My time's valuable," he told the court, "and this is only foolishness to me." He then asked, when the magistrate inquired what hour would suit him on Monday, for nine o'clock, so as to get through this business as quickly as possible. Spectators in the court laughed both times.
When the hearing resumed, Mexican Joe himself took the witness box, testifying that he examined every horse at six each morning and had noticed nothing wrong. Buckskin Bill swore he had broken the animal in himself and that it was no gentle ride. Aspinall ruled that the society had been right to bring the case but declined to convict, letting the prosecution withdraw on payment of costs. Outside, the troupe had come to collect their man on the "tombstone coach" behind its team of four greys, and the crowd pressed in to inspect coach and occupants, one of whom kept putting his head out the window, his scarred scalp suggesting to the reporter that he had at some time fallen victim to Indian savagery. Texas Jack Junior left the court, as he had entered the bridewell, followed by a crowd.
He was, that summer, an object of real fascination. The same papers ran a long, comic column of the letters Mexican Joe had been receiving from "Young Liverpool" — boys offering to groom horses or work for their keep if only he would take them West, two lads of nineteen who could ride and shoot and were out of work, sixteen-year-old girls willing to abandon a dull life for the prairies. One young woman wrote that she was in want of a husband and would be obliged if the Colonel might ask whether any of his cowboys wanted a wife. She thought she'd make a fine wife as she was "young (only 17) with dark hair, blue eyes, rather fair complexion, and a good housekeeper." She added that she had already written to Texas Jack to ask him to meet her, but he had not turned up. Looking at some of his pictures from around the same time, it isn't hard to understand why, out of all the cowboys touring England that summer, she wrote to Texas Jack first.
The girl writing to see if he was interested in marrying her and the immigration officials in multiple countries and the clerk at the bridewell could only write down a stage name because there was no other to be had. Years afterward, on the far side of his life, he would put it on the record himself, under oath, that he had never possessed any other Christian or surname whatsoever. He went through the whole of his life as a borrowed phrase — a Texas Jack, named for the original Texas Jack, John B. Omohundro. The man who, the story goes, had pulled him as a child from an Indian raid and left him with the name. And here he is once more, surfaced in a stranger's album in Michigan, filed among "Our Friends": a sharp, unbothered face under a name that was never really his. Except that it was the only one that ever was.
r/WildWestPics • u/Tryingagain1979 • Jun 08 '26
Artwork On this date in 1874, Apache Chief Cochise dies.
galleryr/WildWestPics • u/goodmedicinegal • Jun 07 '26
Photograph Hunkpapa Chief Sitting Bull dressed in full regalia by David F. Barry (c. 1880)
r/WildWestPics • u/HistoryGoneWilder • Jun 06 '26
Artefacts The cell of Frank James from the famed James-Younger Gang and brother of Jesse James. He was kept here in the Independence, Missouri jail when he surrendered.
r/WildWestPics • u/Tryingagain1979 • Jun 06 '26
Artwork On this date in 1865, Confederate terrorist William Quantrill, the white supremacist mass murderer who schooled Frank and Jesse James in cold-blooded slaughter, died of wounds from a shootout with Union troops in Kentucky.
(Undated illustration of William Clarke Quantril. Courtesy of the Kansas City Public Library.)
r/WildWestPics • u/goodmedicinegal • May 29 '26
Photograph Hunkpapa Chief Sitting Bull and his nephew One Bull photographed by Palmquist and Jurgens (1884)
r/WildWestPics • u/goodmedicinegal • May 26 '26
Photograph The Six Native American leaders present for President Theodore Roosevelts inaugural parade by Edward S. Curtis (1905)
r/WildWestPics • u/goodmedicinegal • May 24 '26
Photograph Watching the Dancers by photographer Edward Curtis (1906)
r/WildWestPics • u/goodmedicinegal • May 21 '26
Photograph A photograph of prominent Oglala chiefs American Horse and Red Cloud by John C.H. Grabill (1891, South Dakota)
r/WildWestPics • u/Tryingagain1979 • May 19 '26