The Wanted Poster: From Dead or Alive Bounties to FBI Billboards

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In 2007 the FBI began flashing fugitives' faces on digital billboards across American cities, yet it did not print color photographs on its paper wanted posters until 2009. That odd timeline opens this history of the wanted poster, an object tied in the imagination to dusty frontier towns but still in use today. At its core the poster has three parts: an image, a description of the alleged crime, and a cash reward. In the 1800s it went up in post offices and public squares, where the whole town gathered and gossip did the rest.

The episode separates the working tool from the Hollywood version. The famous blocky lettering was a matter of cost, since large letters were carved from wood instead of cast in heavy metal. The phrase dead or alive rarely came from sheriffs or marshals, who needed suspects alive for trial. It was more often the work of railroads, banks, and cattle barons protecting their money. From there the story follows the poster into wartime propaganda, modern politics, fingerprint identification, and the electronic networks that made paper a relic.

• The posters issued for John Wilkes Booth and his accomplices after Lincoln's assassination show the wood type style at full force.
• Before photography, a bounty hunter often had to bring back the body to prove he had the right man, which made the corpse the receipt.
• On September 4, 1939, the Daily Mirror branded Adolf Hitler a reckless criminal under the words wanted, dead or alive.
• In 2001 President George W. Bush recalled an old poster out west that said wanted, dead or alive when speaking of Osama bin Laden, and the New York Post ran with it.
• The FBI's billboard program started in 23 cities. By 2014 it reached more than 5,200 billboards and was credited with solving at least 53 cases.