Whatever Happened To The Last American Outlaws? Quiz

Answer: Pat Garrett

The legend of Billy the Kid was cemented by the claim that he had killed 21 men by the age of 21. That figure is disputed, with some sources putting the tally at nine.

Henry McCarty, AKA William Bonney, is believed to have been born in New York City in 1859, but the family moved to the West, where his mother died of tuberculosis. He was separated from his brother, and brought up in foster homes. In 1875 he was arrested for theft, but escaped from custody. A life of crime that included horse theft and murder followed.

But Billy The Kid became a folk hero. Then on July 14, 1881, with a $500 reward on his head, he was shot dead by by New Mexico Sheriff Pat Garrett.

In the movie "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" (1973), Kris Kristofferson played Billy, while James Coburn played Sheriff Pat Garrett. Among the wrong answers, Edward Reilley Forman was the main songwriter of the Oho band Miller-Kelton, who provided the question for this quiz.

Answer: Lousiana

Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were behind a string of robberies during the Great Depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Their story was to be sensationalised in newspapers everywhere.

Both were born in Texas, and met there in 1930. Clyde was arrested for robbery, but escaped from jail with a gun provided by his paramour. Captured again, he stayed in prison until 1932. For almost two years they engaged in a crime spree together (and with associates), holding up gas stations, restaurants, and small-town banks throughout Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Missouri.

In 1933, Bonnie and Clyde engaged in several shoot-outs with police, but escaped. Then, on April 1 1934, they murdered two police officers in Grapevine, Texas, and five days later killed a police constable in Miami, Oklahoma.

On the run again, they were betrayed by an associate. On May 23, 1934, they were driving in Bienville Parish, Louisiana, and came upon a police roadblock. Attempting to flee, their car was fired on by police, and the story of Bonnie and Clyde was ended... at least until Hollywood came along with the movie version of their lives.

Could they have been arrested? That is a question that has been posed. But in their 21 months of crime, Bonnie and Clyde killed nine law officers and four civilians, and it was considered too dangerous to attempt to take them alive. It has been claimed that over 130 rounds were fired into their car. They were given no warning.

Answer: Shot dead in a saloon

Hardin is reputed to have said, "I never killed anyone who didn't need killing". His final tally is unknown; some believe 50 or more dead men were left in his trail. One author, Lee Floren in "John Wesley Hardin: Texas Outlaw", claimed that Billy The Kid paled in comparison. Florin claimed that by his 21st birthday Hardin had killed 27 men.

Hardin was the son of a Methodist preacher and was born in Bonham, Texas, in 1853. He stabbed a schoolmate and killed a man in an argument at the age of 15. He claimed to have taken the lives of several Union soldiers in the War Between the States, according to the Texas State Historical Society.

The law caught up with him and he was jailed in 1877 for the murder of a deputy sheriff. He tried repeatedly to escape, and wrote an autobiography. Hardin was pardoned in 1894 and became a lawyer. But he hired assassins to kill a client with whose wife he was having an affair. On August 19, 1895, Constable John Selman, one of the hired guns, shot and killed Hardin in the Acme Saloon in El Paso, Texas, because he had not been paid.

Answer: Robert Ford

The James brothers were born into a slave-owning family in Missouri. During the War Between The States, Jesse James and his brother Frank were part of a Confederate guerrilla unit that killed a number of Union soldiers. After the Civil War, Jesse James would not accept the defeat of the Confederacy. He launched himself into a life of crime that included robbing banks, stagecoaches, and trains. It is said the saw himself as a latter-day Robin Hood, although there is no evidence he gave anything he stole from the rich to the poor.

The State Historical Society of Missouri claimed the James-Younger gang operated widely from Iowa to Texas to West Virginia. In a 22-year period between 1860 and 1882, they were involved in more than 20 bank and train robberies, netting in all an estimated $200,000. That sum would be worth over $6 million in 2024 money. Anyone who got in their way was killed.

Jesse James became popularised by newspaper headlines. In a letter to a newspaper, James wrote, "We are not thieves, we are bold robbers. I am proud of the name, for Alexander the Great was a bold robber, and Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte."

With a bounty of $10,000 on his head, at the age of 34, James was shot and killed by one of his accomplices, Robert Ford. Initially convicted of murder, Ford was later pardoned by the governor of Missouri.

Answer: Cut off his head

Felipe Nerio Espinosa was born in 1827 in Mexico, although sources differ as to exactly where. He came from a poor family of subsistence farmers and from the reports of locals living there he was an angry young man. His life of crime seemed to start after the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. It was said that he resented the influx of 'Anglos' to his homeland.

According to a Census of 1861, Felipe and his brother Vivian were listed as a brick maker and farmer in San Luis Valley, Colorado. By 1862 the brothers were petty criminals, but stepped up a level with the robbery of a wagon carrying property of a priest. They tied the driver under the wagon and spurred the horses on. The driver survived and named the brothers. They narrowly escaped capture or death when an army patrol went looking for them.

From a mountain hideout, the brothers planned a campaign of revenge for the death of six relatives during the war. In a letter, Felipe vowed to kill 100 'Anglos' for each of them. In 1863, the bloody spell commenced. The brothers did not confine themselves to 'clean' killings. They engaged in brutal slayings too evil to describe here; suffice to say Felipe became known as "the Axeman".

Vivian was eventually killed in a shootout with soldiers. Felipe escaped and teamed up with a 14-year-old boy. More murders followed until the commander of Fort Garland engaged skilled tracker and former US Army scout Thomas Tait Tobin.

After four days he came across the fugitives, shooting Felipe first and then the boy as he tried to run away. Felipe did not die immediately and Tobin killed him with a knife. He then cut off their heads and took them back to Fort Garland in a flour sack.

How many did Felipe kill? In an entry in his diary he claimed 32 lives.

Answer: Her son

Myra Belle Shirley, the 'Bandit Queen', was born into a wealthy Confederate family whose home was used as a hideout by Jesse James and the Younger Brothers. She seemed attracted to the outlaw way of life, marrying three 'bad men' in her time: Jim Reed, Bruce Younger, and Sam Starr.

Belle and Sam Starr were charged with horse theft and she served jail time. That did not seem to deter her, because she was again charged with horse theft, but acquitted. She was also said to have robbed a bank dressed as man.

At the age of 40, Belle Starr was shot in the back and killed in circumstances that have never been resolved. One suspect was her son, Edward Reed, who Starr had beaten for mistreating her horse. "The New York Times" dubbed her "the most desperate woman that ever figured on the borders."

Answer: Shot fleeing from police

J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, declared Charles Arthur "Pretty Boy" Floyd to be Public Enemy Number One. Born in Georgia in 1904, Pretty Boy grew up in Oklahoma, and was arrested aged 18 for theft. Three years later he was sentenced to five years in jail for robbery.

Over the next 13 years, he carried out a life of robbery and a claimed dozen murders; many of the victims were police officers. It was said that after robbing banks Pretty Boy destroyed mortgage documents that indebted poor landowners.

In October 22, 1934, Floyd and his partner, Adam Richetti, became involved in a shootout with law enforcement near Wellsville, Ohio. Richetti was captured but Petty Boy went on the run. Several days later a massive manhunt ended when he was spotted in a cornfield by federal agents and members of the East Liverpool Police Department. He was shot, and died 15 minutes later.

You can visit a marker at the spot in what is now Beaver Creek State Park where he died.

Woody Guthrie added to that romantic notion of the killer writing:
"But a many a starvin' farmer
The same old story told
How the outlaw paid their mortgage
And saved their little homes.
Others tell you 'bout a stranger
That come to beg a meal,
Underneath his napkin
Left a thousand-dollar bill..."

Answer: Killed by gunfire when his car was ambushed

Some sources claim that Villa did not die instantly, but had time to say to a group of reporters, "Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something important." This idea came from the one man who survived the ambush, but he later recanted and said Villa died instantly in a hail of bullets.

Pancho Villa was born Doroteo Arango to sharecropper parents in 1876 in the state of Durango. On the death of his father Villa became the head of the family at the age of 16. He later dictated an autobiography and said he returned from work in the field to find his mother arguing with the owner of the land. Villa claimed the owner wanted his 15-year-old sister. In anger, Villa shot him in the foot and fled to the mountains. It was then, he said, he adopted his new name.

Thus began a life of robbery netting large sums for himself and gang members. He gave some money to his mother, and he claimed he gave one man money to start a tailor shop.

Many legends have grown up, some more plausible than others. Certainly Villa was a wanted man, and was at times involved in shootouts with law officers. He killed several of them. Villa took part in two rebellions against the Mexican authorities, and in 1912 was arrested and sentenced to death. When the sentence was stayed, he escaped prison and fled to the USA.

He returned to Mexico and set up the infamous División del Norte (Division of the North). Eventual success against the Mexican authorities followed, but the victory was short-lived, and he fled Mexico City along with revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata in December 1914.

Years of violence and murder followed, but in 1920 he was granted a government pardon and settled down on a ranch in Chihuahua. Three years later his car was ambushed, and Pancho Villa died in a hail of gunfire. The killers were never caught, and differing theories as to who was behind it have been put forward, with a lot of suspicion pointed at Alvaro Obregón, the Mexican president.

Answer: False

Henry Nreton Brown was born in 1857 and raised in Missouri, but by the age of 17 he was a cowboy working first in Colorado and then in Texas. There he killed a man in a gunfight and fled to New Mexico. He eventually teamed up with Billy The Kid and became part of his gang. When the Kid moved on to New Mexico, Brown stayed in Texas and became a deputy sheriff in Oldham County, but was later fired.

By the early 1880s he was a Marshal in Caldwell, Kansas, and was credited with cleaning up a dirty town. A life of success seemed to be his, but he had serious debts, and turned to crime to meet them. In April 1884 he and three others held up a bank in Medicine Lodge, Kansas. He shot dead the bank president and shot the chief cashier, who managed to close the vault before he died.

The four robbers fled, but were captured by a posse and taken back to the town, where they were lodged in the jail. A mob gathered outside and demanded the men be taken out and hanged. The sheriff refused, but the mob broke in. Brown tried to escape but was shot dead in a hail of bullets. The three others were dragged outside and hanged under an elm tree.

Answer: Shot dead in a gambling dispute

Hyman G. Neill came from a well-to-do Missouri family, and, as a young man, worked as a printer's apprentice. One day he was sent on an errand, but hopped a freight train and disappeared.

A varied and probably lawful life followed - at one time he was involved in an opera company in Mexico - and he wound up in Las Vegas, New Mexico, where he became a Justice of the Peace and formed a police force. The Dodge City Gang, as they became known, enforced the law on criminals, but soon became as bad themselves.

By 1870, Brown was leading his gang in stagecoach robberies, theft, and murder. Brown, though, was the local coroner, and this helped him cover up the crimes.

Eventually the local law-abiding population had had enough, and Brown and his cronies were driven out of town. He ended up in Texas, and there he was visited by the widow of a Las Vegas policeman who had been killed by gangs. Arrested for murder, he was released when the authorities could not put together the evidence.

Together with the widow, he made off, and a contemporary "Chicago Times" edition reported they "have been skylarking through some of the interior towns of Kansas ever since." The demise of Hoodoo Brown is murky, but family members said he died in Mexico, leaving a wife and two sons. Years later it was reported that a Mrs. Hoodoo Brown of Leadville, Colorado, was reported to be the wife of notorious gambler Hoodoo Brown, who had been shot and killed in a gambling dispute.

* He is not to be confused with George W. "Hoodoo" Brown, a rancher and frontiersman of Meade County, Kansas.

Answer: Trapped by soldiers in Bolivia

Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, and their associates probably only robbed four banks, four trains, and a coal company payroll office, but they were to be blamed for every robbery over a wide area.

Butch Cassidy was born Robert LeRoy Parker on April 13, 1866, in Beaver, Utah Territory. His family were Mormons, and after moving to Circleville, Utah, sheltered polygamous Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints families evading the U.S. government.

Working on a ranch, the young Butch got involved in stealing livestock, and is thought to have taken the name "Cassidy" from a co-worker, Mike Cassidy. Cattle rustling and petty crimes followed, but in 1889 he moved up a league, robbing the San Miguel Valley Bank in Telluride with associates Matt Warner and Tom McCarty

In 1889, after a stint in jail, Cassidy met the Sundance Kid. Harry Alonzo Longabaugh was born in Mont Clare, Pennsylvania, in 1867. He left home at 15, and took his name from the town of Sundance in Wyoming, where he was arrested for stealing a horse. His first big crime is thought have been a train robbery in 1892.

They and their 'Wild Bunch' soon became notorious. Cassidy was a meticulous planner of robberies and one source estimated that the heists averaged $35,000 in money stolen. Eventually the Pinkerton Detective Agency was brought in to track down the Wild Bunch - who generally hid out in the Hole In The Wall Pass in Jefferson County, Wyoming.

Cassidy and Sundance fled to Argentina, where they tried their hands at farming. That honest life did not last long, and they took to robbing banks and trains in South America.

Whatever happened to Butch and and Sundance? Popularly they were thought to have died after soldiers surrounded a house in which they were hiding in southern Bolivia on November 3, 1908. The soldiers later heard two shots and entered to find two bodies. They were buried in an Indian graveyard. But....

There is some evidence that the Sundance Kid returned to the USA and married a widow. They lived with her six children in Utah and he died of old age in 1936.

Answer: Natural causes

The life story of John Henry "Doc" Holliday is one of the most fascinating of his time. Born in Griffin, Georgia, on August 14 1851, his family moved to Lowndes County, where Doc received an education in the classics.

He went on to study dental surgery at a college in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and earned a Doctor of Dental Surgery degree in 1872. He began work as a dentist in Atlanta, Georgia, but a short time later he contracted tuberculosis, which had killed his mother and also his adopted brother. Advised to seek a drier climate, he moved to Dallas, Texas, but his his coughing made it impossible to continue work as a dentist.

Doc soon found he was a natural gambler and turned to it as a living. He began to carry a six-gun for protection, and his first known gunfight occurred in January 1875. Neither he nor his opponent was hurt, but Doc was arrested, as the "Dallas Weekly Herald" reported.

Always a hot-head, Doc killed his first victim after he was released from custody. Doc fled to Jacksboro, Texas, where he found a job dealing faro. More gunfights followed and he killed a man, but no action was taken. In 1876 Doc killed a soldier, and, facing the full might of the US Army and other law officers, he fled to Apache lands in what is now Colorado.

Then, with more bodies in his wake, he returned to Dallas under an assumed name. After more incidents (they're getting too many to note here) he met up with Wyatt Earp and began a relationship with the prostitute Mary Catherine Elder Haroney, also known as Big Nose Kate. After he shot a gambler (claiming self-defence) Doc and Big Nose Kate went on the run. They ended up in Dodge City, where Doc tried to go straight. But Kate could not stand a quiet life and they split up. There were to be reunions and splits several more times.

In Dodge City, Doc saved Wyatt Earp's life and he was later to join Earp, then a US Deputy Marshal, in Tombstone. In October 1881, Earp, his two brothers and Doc faced off against the Clanton Brothers and cohorts in what went down in history as the Gunfight at the O. K. Corral. After a blur of gunfire that lasted barely 90 seconds, three of the Clanton gang lay dead. Although Doc and the Earps were tried for murder, their actions were deemed within he law.

Fast-forward several years and many more deadly incidents, in the face of declining health, Doc realised that his days as a gunslinger were over. Seeking the healing powers of warm springs, he headed to Glenwood Springs, Colorado, where he died in his own bed on November 8, 1887.

Answer: Texas Rangers

It is claimed that as well as "The Ballad of Sam Bass", more than 200 books have been written about the outlaw. A major street in Round Rock, Texas, was named after him. Bass was born in Indiana in November 1851, but drifted on to Mississippi and then Texas, where he met Joel Collins and they embarked on a cattle drive.

Honest work followed and Bass developed a reputation as a horse racer, earning enough money to quit regular work. It is not clear why he turned to crime, but a failed mining version in the Dakota Territories did not help.

In 1876, Bass, Collins, and four others robbed a train of $65,000 dollars in gold. That is nearly $1.83 million in 2024 prices. In all, Bass and the seven members of he Sam Bass Gang engaged in four robberies, but the Texas Rangers set them up as public enemies and seemed determined wipe them out. Several encounters ensued in 1878, with Bass and his gang evading capture.

Further less successful robberies followed, but Bass was betrayed to the Texas Rangers, and they ambushed Bass as he was carrying out a bank robbery in Round Rock. Two of the gang were killed on the spot, but the badly wounded Bass fled, only to be found dead two days later. It was his 27th birthday.

Sometimes referred to as 'Texas' Beloved Bandit' and 'Robin Hood on a Fast Horse', Bass was a more inept robber than the legend credits. He was buried in a cemetery at Round Rock, with a headstone that read, "A brave man reposes in death here. Why was he not true?"

Answer: Lynched by a mob

James "Jim" Brown Miller was born near Van Buren, Arkansas, on October 25, 1861. The family relocated to Texas, where he killed his brother-in-law and was convicted. The conviction was overturned on appeal. Earlier he had been suspected of killing his grandparents, but at the age of eight was too young to be tried.

Miller maintained an upright persona, joining churches and making friends in many communities. This was to earn him the nickname 'Deacon' Jim Miller. Make no mistake, though, Miller was what in modern parlance would be called a psychopath.

Between 1884 and 1909, Miller became a prolific killer, mostly as a hired gun. His own tally of murders was 51. Among his victims is alleged to have been Pat Garrett, the killer of Billy the Kid. In February 1909 Miller and associates killed a former Oklahoma Deputy US Marshal. They were later arrested and placed in a town jail. On April 1909, a mob invaded the jail and overpowered the jailers. Miller and his three associates were dragged to a nearby livery stable and hanged. A photograph was taken of the hanging scene, and, should you wish to look it up, you can find it with an internet search.

Answer: Disappeared

Charles Earl Bowles was born in Norfolk, England, in 1829. His family moved to the USA and he was brought up in New York before he made his way to California.
He worked at various jobs during the gold rush times, but turned to crime in the 1870s. His targets were the stagecoaches of California and Oregon, and he became know as Black Bart for his dark clothing and bushy beard.

Feared for his gunmanship, Black Bart never actually harmed anyone on the stages he held up, instead being totally polite. He became known as a 'gentleman bandit". It is thought that he robbed 28 stages and amassed a fortune, but was eventually caught and tried for robbery in 1883.

Even during the trial he remained polite and cooperative, and that might explain why he was sentenced to only six years in San Quentin State Prison. Good conduct led to his release after four years on New Year's Day 1888.

The Calaveras Heritage Council, noted, "He had visibly aged, his eyesight was failing, and he had gone deaf in one ear. Reporters swarmed around him when he was released and asked if he was going to rob any more stagecoaches. 'No, gentlemen,' he smilingly replied, 'I'm through with crime.' Another reporter asked if he would write more poetry. Boles laughed and said, 'Now, didn't you hear me say that I am through with crime?'"

Rumours abounded. He had returned to a life of crime or had been hired by Wells Fargo as a consultant, but nothing was substantiated.