The Legendary Old West Outlaws That Ran Bandit Heaven

Stories about the Wild West, like those passed down by the ancient Greeks, often focus on heroes. We are warmed by the tales of the men — and some women — in white hats. Thankfully, for those of us who make a living writing such stories featuring Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickok, Bat Masterson, Buffalo Bill Cody, Heck Thomas, Charlie Siringo, and others, there is an endless fascination with their legendary exploits.

But let us give credit to the outlaws. We might not want to have encountered them in real life, but today, safely in our stories, they add spice and excitement and danger. In Greek mythology, Odysseus was a great hero, but his adventures would not be as thrilling without that tussle with Cyclops.

In the books that I have researched and written, I’ve had the chilling pleasure of presenting charming rogues, ruthless robbers, stone-cold killers, thieving varmints, and others cut from similar cloth. One who immediately comes to mind is John Wesley Hardin, who claims to have gotten the drop on Hickok when he was the marshal of Abilene, Kansas, in 1871. The gunslinger was only 18, yet his violent reign of terror had begun four years earlier when the Texas teenager knifed a classmate. His six-shooters enabled him to kill his way to Kansas. Hardin is “credited” with the saying “I never killed a man who didn’t need killing.”

John Wesley Hardin in a fight with Mexican Vaqueros at the end of a cattle drive up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene, Kansas. Hardin started an argument with a group of Mexican Cowboys for crowding his herd, which escalated into a gunfight that left six of the Mexican dead, five of them shot by Hardin. 1871.

When Hardin got to Abilene, Marshal Hickok did not care about any Texas arrest warrants, but the town did have a no-gun ordinance and he confronted the young outlaw. The young outlaw ultimately did surrender his pistols, after what was called a “road agent’s spin.” Hardin took his guns out of their holsters, but while he was reaching for them, he claimed in his autobiography, “I reversed them and whirled them over on him with the muzzles in his face.” An amused Hickok invited Hardin to the nearest saloon — without his pistols.

Less well-known but equally fearsome was Clay Allison. In his book Wild West Characters, Dale Pierce describes the Tennessean as “a strange, unpredictable psychopath who drank heavily and enjoyed the company of ladies of the evening, when he wasn’t shooting people for illogical reasons.”

One of the highlights of Allison’s life of infamy occurred in the summer of 1878, when he rode into Dodge City intending to shoot Wyatt Earp. He blamed the assistant marshal for the death of a friend, George Hoy. To be on the safe side, Allison secretly brought along a few cowboys who were to kill Earp if he did not.

The plan went awry. The killer confronted the lawman all right, but after experiencing Earp’s cold, steely gaze, Allison backed down. And there would be no killing by the cowboys. As Earp walked down the street and they prepared to ambush him, the Ford County sheriff quietly approached from behind. This was not just any sheriff but Bat Masterson, and he held a shotgun. Allison’s would-be allies climbed on their horses and left Dodge City.

Robert Clay Allison

While we’re still in that southwest Kansas town, let us recall when bandit queen Belle Starr visited. She and her husband, Sam, were between bank jobs and looking to relax. But Sam snuck off to the Long Branch Saloon to gamble. When, red-faced, he returned to their boardinghouse, he revealed he had lost $2,000 of their ill-gotten gains.

That had to be rectified. Belle marched down the street and into the saloon with guns drawn. The gobsmacked patrons watched as she stepped from table to table, collecting the cash on them and on the players themselves. Belle then backed out, and she and Sam galloped off. With a $7,000 take, the two had made a $5,000 profit that afternoon.

One can even feel sorry for an outlaw. Take Johnny Ringo, the conflicted cowboy of Tombstone’s heyday. He had battled depression since he was a boy and saw his father blow his own head off while cleaning a shotgun. He committed the first of many murders during the Mason County War in Texas in 1875. Several years later, Ringo and his friend Curly Bill Brocius and their cowboy entourage were aligned with shady ranchers like the Clantons and McLaurys in Tombstone.

It was in July 1882 that Ringo’s depression got the best of him. Brocius had been killed during the Earp Vendetta Ride, and his other cowboy pals had scattered. Ringo “had seen the fading future of the cowboy in Cochise County, and with no prospect of being welcomed elsewhere, he had sunk very low,” I wrote in the book Tombstone. “Drunk and despondent, Ringo raised a Colt .45 to his head and pulled the trigger. He was found lying against the trunk of a tree.”

William “Curly Bill” Brocius

If indeed “cleanliness is next to godliness” — coincidentally, a phrase found in a 1791 sermon by a preacher named John Wesley — then that might explain the depravities of “Dirty Dave” Rudabaugh. The hygiene-challenged hombre was a relentless robber of banks, and if some people had to die during these raids, so be it.

In November 1880, Rudabaugh joined with Billy the Kid’s gang, and in White Oaks, New Mexico, they killed a deputy sheriff. Sheriff Pat Garrett and his posse cornered them in a cabin in, appropriately, Stinking Springs, and the outlaws were arrested. Both Billy and Dirty Dave would escape jail. But it would soon be the end of the road for Rudabaugh. While hiding out in Mexico, he killed a poker player who had accused the gringo of cheating. His avenging friends not only knifed him to death, they severed Dirty Dave’s grimy head and paraded it through town.

And as bold a bandit as Tom “Black Jack” Ketchum was, his punishment was a tad extreme. He was captured and sentenced to death in New Mexico for the murder of a deputy. The food must have been pretty good while he was in jail during the appeals process because Black Jack gained a lot of weight. That, plus the ad hoc executioner using too long a rope, resulted in Ketchum’s head being torn off moments after the trapdoor opened.

Leaders of the Wild Bunch (from left to right): Harry Longabaugh (the “Sundance Kid”), Will Carver, Ben (the “Tall Texan”) Kilpatrick, Kid Curry (Harvey Logan), and Butch Cassidy (Robert LeRoy Parker).

Some outlaws got second chances. Emmett Dalton got two of them. The first came in October 1892, when, despite being shot 23 times, he was the only one of five gang members to survive a bullet-riddled battle in Coffeyville, Kansas, that killed his bothers Bob and Grat. The second second chance was after 14 years in prison, when Emmett found success as a real estate speculator and film producer. In the latter capacity, he made movies about the Dalton Gang and the lawmen who caught up to them.

In my latest book, Bandit Heaven, my second-favorite outlaw is Wild Bunch gang member Harvey Logan, better known as Kid Curry. A kid from Iowa, he worked as a cowboy on a ranch in Texas before deciding that bank robberies were far more lucrative way to fund his vices of women and liquor. Embracing a life of crime, he became a malevolent man-killer who was as much a sidekick to Butch Cassidy as the Sundance Kid was, until finally meeting his maker in a 1904 shootout in Colorado in 1904.

My favorite outlaw, though, has to be George “Big Beak” Parrott, more so for his afterlife than his life of crime. The big-nosed bandit had been a busy bad guy, mostly in Wyoming, until the spring of 1881, when he was arrested for killing a deputy sheriff and a Union Pacific detective. During an attempt to escape from jail, Parrott was nabbed by an angry mob and lynched.

But Parrott’s story was far from over. Two physicians, Thomas Maghee and John Osborne, carted Parrott’s body off with the intention of studying his brain to see if there was any indication of why he was a criminal. After the top of the outlaw’s skull was sawn off, it was gifted to Lillian Heath, who, though only 16 years old, was Dr. Maghee’s assistant. (Apparently unscarred by the experience, Heath went on to become Wyoming’s first female physician and reportedly used the skullcap as an ashtray.) A death mask of Parrott’s face was created, and skin from his thighs and chest was removed. The skin, including the dead man’s nipples, was sent to a tannery in Denver, where it was made into a medical bag and a pair of shoes.

(Clockwise from top left): Butch Cassidy, Wild Bill Hickok, Robert Clay Allison, Curly Bill Brocius, Billy the Kid, and Bat Masterson.

Parrott’s dismembered body was stored in a whiskey barrel filled with a salt solution for about a year, while the experiments continued; then he was buried in the yard behind Dr. Maghee’s office. The shoes must have been an attractive and durable enough pair because Dr. Osborne wore them to his inaugural ball when he was sworn in as Wyoming’s first Democratic governor, in 1893.

The executed outlaw’s bones proved to be durable too. On May 11, 1950, while working on the Rawlins National Bank, construction workers unearthed the whiskey barrel. Still inside were the skull with the top sawed off and other remains. Heath, then in her mid-80s, was contacted, and she sent her skullcap to the scene. It was found to fit the skull in the barrel perfectly. DNA testing later confirmed the remains were those of George Parrott.

Today, Governor Osborne’s shoes are on display at the Carbon County Museum in Rawlins as well as the bottom part of Parrott’s skull and his earless death mask. Alas, the medicine bag has never been found.

From our February/March 2025 issue.