30 Old West SECRETS So BIZARRE You’ll Think They’re LIES

PART 2:

   He walked up to their property carrying a fake complaint about a neighbor, and by the time they realized what was happening, it was over. The most painful chapter of his career came when he was ordered to bring in his own son, who had been charged with murdering his wife. He didn’t pass the case to a colleague.

 He didn’t ask for a reassignment. He served the warrant himself. His son was convicted and sentenced to prison, and Bass Reeves went back to work.  Secret number two. The one in three rule. Here’s a number the Westerns  never mentioned. Roughly one in every three cowboys working the great cattle drives of the 1860s through 1880s was either black or Mexican.

 On some trails, particularly those running out of Texas,  the proportion was even higher. The word cowboy itself started as a slur. It was what you called black and Mexican workers who did the lowest and most dangerous trail work. White workers on the same drives were more often referred to as herders or ranch hands.

 The linguistic hierarchy told you exactly where you stood before a single  word was spoken. This wasn’t a social experiment or progressive moment in American history. It was economics. After the Civil War, the labor pool in the South was shattered, and someone had to move millions of longhorns north to the rail depots.

 Ranch owners hired whoever was available and skilled, which included formerly enslaved men  who had worked with cattle their entire lives. They were excellent at the job. They were also paid less  and given the most dangerous assignments. Hollywood spent a century erasing them, which is one of the more thorough acts of historical revision you’ll find anywhere. Secret number three.

 Charley Parkhurst and the secret vote. Charlotte Parkhurst went by Charley her entire working life and was one of the most celebrated stagecoach drivers on the West Coast. She drove six-horse teams through Sierra Nevada mountain passes, lost her left eye to a horse kick, and kept her identity secret for decades. In 1868, she voted in a presidential election in California.

 Nobody at the polling station had any reason to suspect otherwise. She died in 1879. It was only when the coroner prepared her body that the secret came out. Depending on how you count it, Charlotte Parkhurst may have been the first woman to vote in a US presidential election decades before the 19th Amendment. Secret number four.

 The teenage frontier. The Civil War killed approximately 620,000  soldiers between 1861 and 1865. In a country with a total population of around 31 million, that is a catastrophic proportion of young working-age men. The labor shortage it created rippled through the economy for a generation.

 On the cattle drives that defined the post-war West, the average cowboy was somewhere between 17 and 22 years old. Foremen in their mid-20s were considered experienced veterans. Trail bosses managing thousands of cattle and a dozen men were sometimes not old enough to legally drink in a modern American bar. The mythological cowboy, weathered, wise, middle-aged, all leather and philosophy, was largely  a fiction.

 The real ones were teenagers doing a brutal job for very little money in places where one  mistake could end them. Secret number five. Stagecoach Mary. Mary Fields was 60 years old, 6 ft tall, and weighed somewhere  around 200 lb when the US Postal Service hired her in 1895 to deliver mail in Cascade County, Montana. She became the first African-American woman to work as  a postal carrier in the country’s history.

 She delivered mail through Montana winters for 8 years without missing  a single scheduled run. The story most often told about her involves her mail sled tipping over in a snowstorm. Rather than abandoning the route, she righted the sled, reloaded the bags, and finished the delivery. The town of Cascade liked her so much that they passed a specific exception to the local ordinance banning women from saloons, applying it only to her.

 She had a standing invitation to drink at the bar that no other woman in the territory shared. At some point in her 60s, she knocked out a man with a single punch for insulting her. When she died in 1914, the town closed the schools for her funeral. Secret number six. The Chinese wall of death.

 Chinese laborers building the Central Pacific Railroad were paid $27 to $30 a month. White workers doing identical jobs earned $35 and received room and board. The Chinese workers paid for their own food. For blasting through sheared granite cliffs in the Sierra Nevada, workers were lowered in woven baskets down the cliff face.

 From the baskets  suspended over a several hundred foot drop, they drilled into the rock, packed in nitroglycerin, lit the fuse, and signaled to be pulled up. If the rope was frayed or the timing was off, they died. The Central Pacific kept no official records of Chinese worker deaths. Historical estimates range from several hundred to over a thousand.

 The famous completion photograph at Promontory Summit contains no Chinese workers. We’re only six secrets in, and we’ve already dismantled half of what the movies told you. Wait until we get to the part about the embalmed outlaw who ended up painted neon orange in a carnival funhouse. That one still makes historians  uncomfortable.

Secret number  seven. The Pinkerton Army. The Pinkerton National Detective Agency is where the term private eye comes from. Their logo was a single open eye with the motto,  “We never sleep.” In the 1870s and early 1880s, at their peak, the Pinkerton Agency employed more active agents than the entire standing US Army.

Let that settle for a moment. A private company hired by railroads and wealthy landowners    with a larger operational force than the federal military. They weren’t just  detectives in the traditional sense. They ran surveillance operations, infiltrated labor unions, broke strikes with organized violence, hunted outlaws across state lines, and operated as a private intelligence service for whoever could pay their rates.

 Several states eventually passed laws specifically banning the hiring of Pinkerton agents because they’d become too powerful. Secret number eight. The diamond mine that fooled Tiffany. In 1872, Philip Arnold and John Slack walked into a San Francisco bank claiming they’d found a diamond deposit in the Colorado wilderness.

 What they didn’t mention was that those diamonds had been purchased in London for $20,000 and scattered across a Wyoming field. The founder of Tiffany & Company was brought in to appraise the site and valued the deposit at $13 million. Arnold and Slack collected a fortune from investors and disappeared. A government geologist eventually exposed the fraud by noticing the distribution patterns were too uniform, and the stones showed tool marks.

 Arnold settled in Kentucky,  opened a bank, and died of natural causes in 1878 without ever being successfully prosecuted. Secret number nine, the Reno brothers invent the train robbery. Before the Reno brothers of Indiana, train robberies happened at stations. You waited for the train to stop, you held up the people at the station, and you ran.

 The Renos decided this was inefficient. In 1866, they boarded a moving train, walked through the cars to the safe compartment, and threw the safe out the door while the train was still moving. They retrieved it from the countryside at their leisure. It contained $13,000. This was the invention of the Wild West train robbery as a specific crime form, the thing that became iconic in every Western film ever made.

 The Renos ran the operation for about 2 years before the Pinkertons caught up with them. Their ending was not a dramatic standoff. A vigilante mob broke into the jail in New Albany, Indiana, where the four brothers were being held and hanged all four of them simultaneously  from the same rafter.

 Secret number 10, the Bloody Benders of Kansas. Between 1871 and 1873, travelers passing through southeastern Kansas began disappearing at a slightly alarming rate. The Bender family, father, mother, son, and daughter Kate, ran a small inn and general store on the Osage Trail.    It was a natural stopping point. The interior of the inn was divided by a canvas curtain.

 Guests seated in the seat of honor, the chair closest to the curtain, were positioned against it. Kate Bender, who advertised herself as a spiritualist and healer, would engage the guest in conversation while her father stood on the other side of the curtain with a sledgehammer. When the Benders eventually fled, investigators found 11 bodies buried beneath the property.

 The victims had all been struck from behind, their throats cut. The family was never definitively caught. Kate Bender in particular became something of a folk  legend, with various women being arrested for years afterward and claimed to be her, none of them conclusively proven to be. Secret number 11, Billy the Kid’s $500 problem.

Billy the Kid’s famous bounty, that is, $500, posted by New Mexico Territory Governor Lew Wallace, sounds straightforward. It wasn’t. Pat Garrett, the sheriff who shot Billy the Kid in July 1881, spent the next year fighting the territorial legislature to actually receive the reward money. The governor had posted the bounty somewhat informally, and the legislature was not enthusiastic about paying it.

 Garrett had to lobby, petition, and argue his case for nearly 12 months before the funds were released. Meanwhile, the dime novel industry was already turning Billy the Kid into a legend, Garrett himself eventually wrote a biography of Billy, largely to rehabilitate his own public image, which had suffered from the perception that he’d shot an unarmed man in a dark room.

 Secret number 12,  Laura Bullion, the thorny rose. Laura Bullion was a member of Butch  Cassidy’s Wild Bunch, and she was arguably more sophisticated in her criminal technique  than most of her colleagues, who tended toward the ride and fast and shoot a lot school of methodology. Her specialty was laundering.

 She would take stolen bank notes and cycle them through legitimate transactions, small purchases, exchanges at businesses, deposits that made the money look clean. When Pinkerton agents finally arrested her in 1901, they found 8,500 in stolen currency sewn into the lining of her clothing. She served 3 years in prison, was released, moved to Memphis, and spent the rest of her life working as a seamstress and interior decorator under her own name.

 She died in 1961. Her obituary did not mention the Wild Bunch. Which of these stories did you already know, and which one genuinely surprised you? I’m curious where people’s knowledge actually is on this stuff. Secret number 13, Judge Parker’s Gallows. Isaac Parker was appointed federal judge for the Western District of Arkansas in 1875, and his jurisdiction covered 74,000 square miles of territory with essentially no other federal legal authority.

The Indian Territory alone had tens of thousands of residents and almost no functioning legal system. Parker held court for 21 years and sentenced to 60 men to death, of whom 79 were actually executed. He once scheduled a hanging of six men simultaneously on the same scaffold on the same day, partly for efficiency and partly, it seems, to make a point to the surrounding territory about what federal law looked like when it arrived. He was not a sadist.

 By the accounts of people who knew him, he was a deeply religious man who found the executions genuinely painful. He simply believed, with total conviction, that visible and overwhelming justice was the only thing that could bring order to a region that had none. Whether he was right is a different question.

 Secret number 14, the silent lynchings. The documented lynchings of the American West, the ones in town squares with crowds watching, represent only a portion of what actually happened. Historians estimate that for every public execution by mob, there  were multiple private ones that left no official record. The Johnson County War in Wyoming in 1892 is a relatively well-documented example of how this worked at a systemic level.

Wealthy cattle barons,  frustrated by competition from small ranchers and homesteaders, hired gunmen and compiled lists of men they wanted eliminated. These men weren’t given trials or public confrontations. They were shot from ambush, or found hanged in their homes, or simply disappeared. The legal machinery was largely controlled by the same interests doing the hiring.

Secret number 15, George Maledon, the Prince of Hangmen. George Maledon served as the official executioner under Judge Parker for years, and he brought a craftsman’s mentality to the work that most people find deeply unsettling in retrospect. He kept detailed records of every execution, the weight of the condemned, the calculated drop distance, the knot placement.

 He believed that a clean break of the cervical vertebrae was a professional obligation. A botched hanging that resulted in strangulation was, in his view, a failure of craft. He performed over 60 executions  and reportedly showed no visible emotion during any of them. He also kept the ropes. After each notable execution, Maledon coiled the rope and stored it.

He eventually toured with these relics as part  of a traveling exhibition he called The History of Crime, charging admission for people to see the instruments of death and hear his commentary on the men who had died by them. Secret number 16, the Coffeeville Postcards. When the Dalton gang’s 1892 double bank robbery failed spectacularly, four of five gang members were killed in the street.

 Townspeople carried the bodies to an alley, propped them against the wall, and charged photographers for access.    The photos were printed as postcards and sold at dry goods stores and train stations across the country. People collected them. Some survive in private collections today. Secret number 17, Elmer McCurdy’s 60-year journey.

After outlaw Elmer McCurdy was shot in 1911, his undertaker embalmed him with an arsenic technique  that preserved the tissue like wax, then propped the body in the doorway  and charged 5 cents to look. Men claiming to be his brothers eventually took the body. They were carnival promoters.

 McCurdy spent decades traveling between sideshows and haunted attractions, sometimes labeled a mummy, sometimes not labeled at all. In 1976, a film crew at a Long Beach amusement park moved what they thought was a prop hanging in a funhouse. The arm came off. Inside was a human bone. He was finally buried in Guthrie, Oklahoma in 1977, 66 years after he died.

 Concrete was poured over the grave to prevent anyone from digging him up again. Secret number 18, the Yuma Dark Cell. The Yuma Territorial Prison was built into a granite bluff in one of the hottest regions in North America. Its punishment cell was carved directly into the rock below the main structure with no light source of any kind.

 Sentences ran from a few days to, in documented cases, more than 100. Prison records show that several inmates who served extended periods emerged with permanent damage, loss of vision, psychological breaks that never  healed, described in the official logs with the same bureaucratic neutrality used to note supply deliveries.

  Secret number 19, banishment as a death sentence. Before the telegraph, being run out of a town was serious but survivable. You could ride 50 miles in a day and be somewhere nobody knew your name. After the telegraph connected Western towns in the 1860s and ’70s, banishment became something considerably darker.

 When a man was expelled from one community, a telegram often followed him. Saloons, hotels, and general stores in neighboring towns received the message. A man who couldn’t buy food, water, a night’s shelter, or even a drink of water from a well that someone owned in a desert environment was not  going to last long. The legal record doesn’t count these deaths because they weren’t technically executions.

 They were just the logical outcome of the communication infrastructure  being used as a weapon. Secret number 20, the execution picnic. Scheduled hangings in the 1870s and ’80s were announced  like market days. Food vendors set up outside the jail. Families traveled from surrounding counties. Afterward, entrepreneurs  sold lengths of rope advertised as pieces of the actual hanging rope to a crowd  that consistently wanted them.

Some events drew thousands of spectators. Whether they came for justice, for spectacle, or simply because nothing else was happening is a question the historical record can’t fully answer. Secret number 21, the hat nobody wore. John B. Stetson’s wide-brimmed Boss of the Plains is the hat in every Western film ever made.

 Most trail cowboys wore bowler hats. The reason is simple. A wide brim in wind becomes a sail. The bowler sat low, stayed put, and did its job. The iconic Stetson was popular among ranchers and lawmen who wanted to project an image, not among men spending 12 hours a day on horseback in open country. Secret number 22,  the dollar-a-day trap.

 Cowboys earned roughly $25 to $40 a month, but most didn’t own their gear. Saddles, boots, and rope were purchased on credit from the ranch’s own supply operation at prices the ranch set. By the end of the 3-month drive, the accounting often left the cowboy owing the ranch owner money, a debt structure that kept workers tied to one operation with no practical way out.

 Secret number 23, what was actually in the whiskey? Raw grain alcohol was cheap. Aged whiskey was not. The documented recipe in many frontier saloons included tobacco juice for color, dried chili peppers for burn, and in some cases strychnine in doses small enough not to kill immediately, but large enough to produce a physical sensation that mimicked a strong alcohol reaction. The drinker felt buzzed.

 They just didn’t know it was the early stages of mild poisoning. Secret number 24, the sepsis frontier. The most common cause of death among trail cowboys was not gunfights. It was infection. 12 hours a day in a saddle produced friction sores. Friction sores in dirty conditions became infected. Infected  sores without antibiotics could progress to gangrene within days.

 A clean pair of socks was genuine health equipment  on the trail. Men who kept small wounds clean were more likely to survive a 3-month drive than men who didn’t. Secret number 25, the mercury  cure. The standard frontier treatment for syphilis was blue mass, pills made primarily from mercury. Mercury kills indiscriminately, causing neurological damage, hair loss, severe mouth sores, tooth loss, and in sufficient doses, organ failure.

 Doctors of the era understood it was dangerous and prescribed it anyway because late-stage syphilis was worse. The phrase “A night with Venus, a lifetime with mercury” was not ironic. It was a fairly accurate medical prognosis. Secret number 26, killing the food source. General Philip Sheridan argued publicly that commercial buffalo hunters were doing more to end Plains Indian resistance than the army could accomplish militarily.

 The bison were the central resource of the Plains cultures, food, clothing, shelter, tools. Remove them and you remove the foundation of the resistance. By 1884, the continental population had fallen from an estimated 30 million animals to fewer than 400. It is one of the fastest deliberate destructions of a large mammal species in recorded history,  argued for openly in congressional testimony.

Secret number 27,  the red ghost of Arizona. In the late 1880s, Arizona ranchers reported encounters with an enormous reddish camel, not inexplicable since the army had imported camels to the Southwest in the 1850s and released them when the project was abandoned. What made the red ghost different was the figure on its back.

 Witnesses consistently described a human shape lashed to the hump. The animal charged camps and killed at least one woman. A rancher shot it in 1893. There were indeed human remains strapped to the back, fragmentary bones and tattered clothing. Secret number 28, the Tombstone Pterodactyl. In 1890, the Tombstone Epitaph ran a story claiming two ranchers had killed a large flying creature in the Arizona desert with a wingspan of approximately 90 ft, smooth leathery skin, and a tooth beak. It was very possibly a slow news

week fabrication. What has kept it alive for over a century  is that the physical description aligns reasonably well with fossil records for large Cretaceous pterosaurs in that region before those fossil records were widely known. People are still arguing about it. Secret number 29, the devil’s rope. Joseph Glidden patented barbed wire in 1874.

Within a decade, it had ended the open range, the informal common system where cattle grazed across vast unowned land and cowboys moved freely. Large landowners fenced their claims and blocked the trails that had connected the West for a generation. The response was the fence-cutting wars, where cowboys systematically destroyed the new fences.

 The Texas legislature made fence cutting a felony in 1884. The wire won. The era of the open trail ended not with a gunfight, but with a property rights dispute decided in a state legislature.    Secret number 30, the gun-free zone at the OK Corral. The Earp brothers were at the OK Corral because they were enforcing a local gun control ordinance.

Tombstone City Ordinance number nine required all visitors to surrender their firearms at the sheriff’s office upon arrival. The Clanton and McLaury group hadn’t complied. The most iconic gunfight in Western mythology  was, legally speaking, a dispute about a city’s right to regulate firearms within its limits.

 Virgil Earp was the chief law enforcement officer of a gun-free zone. The mythologized version is a better product than the truth. It’s easier to watch and easier to sell. But the actual story is more complicated, more painful, and considerably more impressive. If you want to go deeper on any of these, Bass Reeves, the Bender family, Elmer McCurdy’s 66-year journey through American carnival culture, let me know in the comments.

And if you know someone who still thinks the Old West was exactly like the movies,  share this with them. It wasn’t. It was stranger, harder, and far more interesting than that.