The Doolin-Dalton Gang: How the Real Wild Bunch Was Hunted to Extinction

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The Wild Bunch of the 1890s, also called the Doolin-Dalton Gang, began with a pay dispute. Bill Doolin, George Newcomb, and Charlie Pierce were hired guns for Bob Dalton until a bloody train robbery at Adair in July 1892 convinced them he was shortchanging them. They quit. Three months later Dalton tried to rob two banks at once in Coffeyville, Kansas, and four of the five gang members involved were killed. Visiting the Daltons' grieving mother in Kingfisher, Doolin proposed a new crew to avenge the dead, and Bill Dalton said yes.

Revenge was the pitch, but the business was banks and trains. From a base in the village of Ingalls the gang became the Oklahoma Long Riders, famous for ankle-length dusters and shielded by locals who resented railroads and banks. This episode follows their run from the Spearville bank job to the Battle of Ingalls on September 1, 1893, and the 1894 trial that pushed a furious judge to tell marshals to bring the outlaws in dead. It ends with a hundred deputies, the telegraph, and a chartered locomotive closing in on men still fighting on horseback.

• Two teenage girls known as Cattle Annie and Little Britches spied for the gang, watching general stores for lawmen buying ammunition in bulk.
• During the June 1893 Cimarron train robbery, Doolin took a Winchester bullet through his left foot and limped in pain for the rest of his life.
• After a jury convicted Arkansas Tom of manslaughter rather than murder, Judge Frank Dale told Marshal E.D. Nix his deputies need not bother with arrests.
• At Dover in April 1895 the gang could not open a safe holding an army payroll and ended up taking pocket watches and loose change from passengers.
• Only two of the eleven core members lived to see the 20th century, yet the gang inspired comic books, films, and the Eagles' 1973 album Desperado.