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Although settlements on the American frontier existed for hundreds of years prior to the Civil War, when historians talk about life in the Old West, they are generally referring to the period between 1865 and 1890. Outlaw activity in the “Wild West” extended into the early 20th century and the vocation - although not the actual term - of “bounty hunter” existed both prior to the Civil War and in other areas of the country.
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When you try to think of a word synonymous with the Wild West
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the first thing that comes to mind is probably cowboy. But bounty hunter is at least top five
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In Western-themed films, TV shows, and literature, the bounty hunter was usually the shadowy antihero
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a lone wolf with no real connection to the law who got huge rewards in return for capturing
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or eliminating outlaws. While that image made for some great stories, in reality, life as a bounty hunter was far different
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So, today we're looking at what it was like to be a bounty hunter in the Old West
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Ironically, despite the popularity of Old West stories about anti-hero bounty hunters chasing down vicious outlaws in the windswept desert
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the term bounty hunter didn't even exist at the time they were supposed to have been doing all this bounty hunting
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The term bounty dates back to the early 1300s. Its original meaning was kindness or goodness
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It wasn't until the early 1700s that the word took on the meaning of a reward
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but in the form of a bonus given to men to entice them to join a country's army or navy
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As in, join now and get a $15 bounty at Red Lobster
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By the 1800s, the term bounty hunter was in use for people who received bonuses for collecting animal pelts or dead birds
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but not for those tracking and capturing outlaws. American author Norman A. Fox, who specialized in Western stories, used Bounty Hunter with its present-day meaning in 1953, followed in 1954 by American novelist and screenwriter Elmore Leonard
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Incidentally, Leonard created Raylan Givens, the hard-edged Western lawman played by Timothy Olyphant in the television series Justified
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As boring as it sounds, most bounty hunters were actually lawmen or freelancers contracted from detective agencies or hired by banks
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In an ysis of 255 gunfighters, only three were found to be the type of steely, cool bounty hunter
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featured in movies and TV. And even those guys only did their hunting on an occasional basis
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Most rewards were $100 or lower, which wasn't enough to make it a full-time gig
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If you wanted to be in the business of tracking down bad guys, you had to have a day job
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Sort of like every actor in LA. Wonder how many bounty hunters worked as servers at Tender Greens
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Furthermore, the bounties being offered weren't necessarily guaranteed. In the case of Pat Garrett, a sheriff just looking to make some extra cash
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New Mexico Governor Blue Wallace placed a newspaper ad offering a reward for Billy the Kid capture to the tune of which was pretty big money for a bounty When Garrett attempted to claim the bounty however Wallace tried to tell him he wasn entitled to it
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claiming it was a personal offer that wasn't binding to the territory itself
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OK, sure, whatever that means. Garrett persisted and eventually received the reward
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but not before local citizens, disgusted by the governor's refusal to honor the offer
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did the Wild West version of a GoFundMe and raised $1,150 to send to Garrett
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Not to say there wasn't the occasional Texas tornado-sized payday. Take Jesse James
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Everyone else sure tried to. Even people who don't know much about history or the Old West
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usually recognize the name Jesse James. He and his older brother, Frank, were two of the most infamous outlaws in American history
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In 1882, Thomas T. Crittenden, the governor of Missouri, offered a reward of $25,000 for the capture of Jesse, dead or alive
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and a $15,000 reward for Frank, adjusting for inflation. That $40,000 total would be equal to $2.4 million in 2020
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which is no small potatoes. You can buy a lot of cowboy hats with that
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Crittenden allegedly had held secret meetings with the coward Robert Ford, a new recruit to the James gang
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who had been invited to live with Jesse and his family. On April 3, 1882, Ford took Jesse out
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by shooting him in the back while the outlaw was dusting a picture, which seems like a pretty low thing
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to do, and Ford's actions remain controversial to this day. On the other hand, did we mention how
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high that reward was? But if you think $25,000 is a lot, John Wilkes Booth rang up even higher
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numbers, which makes sense. On April 20, 1865, the US War Department offered a reward for John
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Wilkes Booth and accomplices David Harreld and John Surratt, $50,000 of which was for Booth himself
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Adjusting for inflation, that $100,000 would be equivalent to approximately $9.8 million in 2020
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more than enough to hang up your gun belt and spurs. Those kind of paydays, however
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were extremely rare. Most of the time, you'd be risking your life to capture or eliminate
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dangerous criminals for minimum wage. Sometimes that risk was pretty high, like in the case of
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John Jack Duncan. In 1876, the Texas Rangers sought out Jack Duncan, a 27-year-old police
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officer and asked him if he'd be down for a little spy action
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They were looking for the notorious outlaw John Wesley Harden and needed an undercover agent
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to get them the information they needed to find him. The Rangers promised Duncan a share of the $4,000 reward
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if he agree to help them infiltrate Harden crew So using the pseudonym of Williams Duncan moved to Gonzales County where Hardin was suspected of hiding and worked as a laborer and handyman
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What followed was a Donnie Brasco-esque scheme of dual identities and double crosses
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Duncan made sure to pledge loyalty to the people in Hardin's circle, even befriending Neil Bowen, the outlaw's father-in-law
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Bowen eventually took in Duncan, I mean Williams, as a boarder. Duncan went deep undercover
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He even had the Texas Rangers arrest him at one point to make his cover story more believable
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Duncan eventually tricked Bowen into giving him Harden's location and gave the info to the Rangers
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who finally nabbed Harden on a train headed to Florida. Duncan got his money, but quit the Texas Rangers after just four months to work as a private detective and bounty hunter in Dallas
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Despite the generally appealing depiction of bounty hunters in popular entertainment as grim but honorable antiheroes
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with an unflinching sense of justice? In reality, the work they did was frequently unglamorous
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if not downright villainous. The first Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1793
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which gave local governments the right to seize and return escaped enslaved people to their owners
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As a result, bounty hunters were regularly hired to track down these fugitives
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You probably won't see Steve McQueen take too many of those bounties on wanted dead or alive
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The law also stated that slave owners and their agents had the right to search for escapees in free states
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If a suspected escapee was captured, the bounty hunter would then go before a judge
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and provide evidence that the person was enslaved. If the court was satisfied with the proof
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the owner could then take the escapee back to his or her own state, whether or not
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they had actually been a slave. Northern states tried to prevent this miscarriage of justice
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For example, they passed personal liberty laws that gave accused runaways the right to a jury trial
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These laws also protected free black people, many of whom had been abducted by bounty hunters and sold into slavery
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This law did end up being challenged in the 1842 Supreme Court case Prigg v. Pennsylvania
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which revolved around a bounty hunter named Edward Prigg, a Maryland resident convicted of kidnapping someone he thought was an escaped enslaved person
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The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Prigg, setting the precedent that federal laws superseded any state measures that attempted to interfere
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with the Fugitive Slave Act, although northern states still refused to abide by it. So if you
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were trying to earn a living as a bounty hunter, you could regularly find yourself tasked with
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bringing in people whose only crime was wanting to live free If you think some of these outlaws were scary there were some equally dangerous bounty hunters out there in the Wild West if not more so Take Henry Newton Brown
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In 1882, he became the Assistant Marshal of Caldwell, Kansas, and was later promoted to Marshal
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But what nobody knew was that Brown was a former outlaw who had been part of Billy the Kid's gang
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and in 1878 had ambushed and slain a sheriff during the Lincoln County War
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He also joined forces with Billy the Kid instead of capturing him and attempted a robbery of the
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Medicine Lodge Bank, fatally shooting the bank's manager in the process. The bandits were captured
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and taken to the Medicine Lodge jail. Brown wasn't so lucky. He was gunned down as he attempted to
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escape. Should have stuck with the script, man. Those Marshall paychecks couldn't have been that
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bad. But the most infamous bounty hunter was probably Tom Horn. In the late 1880s, the Pinkerton
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National Detective Agency, hired Horn as a bounty hunter and tracker, but he didn't stay with them
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for long. He became a gun for hire and was thought to be responsible for the murder of more than a
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dozen people. In other words, he was too wild and unpredictable even for the Pinkertons
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and that's saying something. It's like getting kicked out of Motley Crue for partying too hard
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Ironically, Horn was hanged in 1903 after being convicted of a crime many historians believe he
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did not commit, the shooting of 14-year-old Willie Nickel, who was shot in the back on July 18
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1901. Even bad guys did a little bounty hunting on the side, though their reasons might not have
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been as altruistic. The Dunn brothers, B, Calvin, Dahl, George, and Bill, ran a boarding ranch near
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Ingalls, Oklahoma, where they allowed outlaws to hide out. As a neat little side gig, the brothers
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also occasionally robbed or killed the travelers who stayed there. In addition, they ran a meat
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Market in Pawnee, a convenient way for them to get rid of the cattle they occasionally rustled
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According to one account, the Dunns made a deal with lawmen in which they agreed to help capture
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members of the outlaw Doolin-Dalton gang in exchange for getting the cattle rustling charges
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against them dropped. Their younger sister Rose had been romantically involved with George
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Bitter Creek Newcomb, and on May 2nd, 1895, he and fellow Doolin-Dalton member Charlie Pierce
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arrived at the ranch to see her. Conflicting reports exist about what happened next
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Depending on the source, the brothers either tipped off the law, who then ambushed and
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eliminated the outlaws, or the Dunn brothers terminated Newcomb and Pierce themselves
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Either way, Pierce and Newcomb ended up in the ground, and the Dunns collected the bounty
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which reportedly was $5,000 for each man, enough to finally retire from this life of crime
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Or on second thought, maybe not