Wild West Trivia (20 question Wild West quiz)

Butch Cassidy's first criminal offense was minor. Around 1880, he journeyed to a clothier's shop in another town, but found it closed. He broke into the shop and stole a pair of jeans and some pie, leaving an IOU promising to pay on his next visit. The clothier pressed charges, but Cassidy was acquitted by a jury.

Henry McCarty was born in New York City in 1859, far from the West where he would eventually become famous as Billy the Kid. Although he is generally depicted as a ruthless killer, Billy only wanted to avenge the murder of his employer who treated him like a son. Only four of the men Billy shot actually died, and these may all be considered acts of self-defense or self-preservation. At the age of 21, Billy paid the ultimate price for his violent lifestyle when he was shot and killed by sheriff Pat Garrett in a pitch black room at Fort Sumner. Many years later, a man calling himself Brushy Bill Roberts claimed to be Billy the Kid. He claimed that Garrett had mistakenly killed a man by the name of Billy Barlow. These claims were never verified.

The Colt Peacemaker, a .45-caliber gun manufactured by Colt's Fire Arms Manufacturing Company in Hartford, Connecticut, was produced for the first time in 1873 and has become known as "the gun that won the West". At the time, it sold for $17.00.

On May 29, 1899, Pearl Hart and a man named Joe Boot (probably an alias) stopped the Globe, Arizona stagecoach and relieved its passengers of all their money -- about $400. Feeling badly at leaving her victims penniless, Pearl decided to return a dollar to each of them -- "enough to eat on". The woman bandit became an overnight sensation, and after her arrest, crowds gathered at the courthouse to get her autograph. She claimed to have committed the robbery because she needed money for her ailing mother, and the sympathetic jury released her, but when she was picked up a few months later for carrying an illegal weapon, she was sent to Yuma Territorial Prison where she earned the distinction of not only being the first woman sent there, but also the first woman to become pregnant while in prison! As the only men who had been alone with her were the prison guards, a preacher, and the Governor of Arizona, Pearl was discretely pardoned and asked to leave the state.

The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral was a 30-second shootout between lawmen and members of a loosely organized group of outlaws that took place at about 3:00 p.m. on Wednesday, October 26, 1881, in Tombstone, Arizona. It is generally regarded as the most famous shootout in the history of the American Wild West.

In poker, aces and eights are known as the Dead Man's Hand. According to legend, this is the result of an incident that took place on August 2, 1876, when an alcoholic drifter named Jack McCall shot and killed Wild Bill Hickok while playing poker in a saloon in Deadwood, South Dakota. When he was shot, Hickok was holding a pair of black aces and a pair of black eights. There is some disagreement as to the fifth card, but according to some first-hand accounts, it was a five or nine of diamonds.

Jesse James took great delight in his notoriety and once went so far as to write his own press release and hand it to the engineer of the train he was robbing before riding away with his men. This press release, entitled "A true account of this present affair", stated: "The most daring robbery on record. The southbound train on the Iron Mountain Railroad was stopped here this evening by five heavily armed men and robbed of ____ dollars... The robbers were all large men, none of them under six feet tall. They were masked, and started in a southerly direction after they had robbed the train, all mounted on fine-blooded horses. There is a hell of an excitement in this part of the country!"

Times were rough for ladies in the Wild West, so this crackerjack stagecoach driver decided to live most of her life as a man. Born in 1812, Parkhurst lived well into her sixties, in spite of being a hard-drinking, tobacco-chewing, fearless, one-eyed brute. She drove stages for Wells Fargo and the California Stage Company, not an easy or particularly safe career. Using her secret identity, Parkhurst was a registered voter and may have been the first American woman to cast a ballot. She lived out the rest of her life raising cattle and chickens until her death in 1879. It was then that her true identity was revealed, much to the surprise of her friends.

In 1911, Elmer McCurdy robbed a passenger train he thought contained thousands of dollars, but the disappointed outlaw made off with just $46 and was shot by lawmen shortly thereafter. McCurdy's unclaimed corpse was then embalmed with an arsenic preparation and sold by the undertaker to a traveling carnival that exhibited it as a sideshow curiosity. For about 60 years, McCurdy's body was bought and sold by various haunted houses and wax museums for use as a prop or attraction. His corpse finally wound up at The Pike, an amusement park funhouse in a Long Beach, California. During filming there in 1976 for the television show The Six Million Dollar Man, a prop man moved what was thought to be a wax mannequin that was hanging from a gallows. When the mannequin's arm broke off, a human bone and muscle tissue were visible. Subsequent testing by the Los Angeles coroner's office revealed the prop was actually McCurdy, and he was buried at the famous Boot Hill cemetery in Dodge City, Kansas, 66 years after his death.

Black Bart, a.k.a. Charles E. Boles, wore socks over his boots during his robberies so that he couldn't be tracked. He considered himself a gentleman outlaw and enjoyed taunting his victims by leaving little bits of poetry behind in empty strongboxes to confuse those that would pursue him. He was eventually arrested in 1883 after dropping a handkerchief with an identifying laundrymark at the sight of one of his stagecoach robberies. He was sentenced to San Quentin Prison for six years, but had his sentence shortened to four years for good behavior. A short time after his release, he disappeared and was never heard from again.

Tombstone was one of the most lawless mining camps in the American West and had its share of criminal elements, but the Cochise County Cowboys were the most infamous. Originally working as ranchers or cowhands, this group of relatives and acquaintances quickly turned to a life of crime. They were so infamous that they are one of the reasons we use the term "cowboy" today. Back then, however, calling an honest rancher a "cowboy" was an insult.

The demand for law enforcement grew following Wild Bill Hickok's murder, and Seth Bullock's background made him the logical choice for Deadwood's first sheriff. During his tenure, Bullock took his job seriously, deputizing several residents and tackling the job of civilizing the camp. Despite (or perhaps because of) his uncompromising nature and a reputation for fearlessness, Bullock managed the task without killing anyone.

Unlike other Old West outlaws such as Jesse James and Butch Cassidy, Billy the Kid didn't make his living as a bandit. The young gunslinger stole the occasional horse, but he never once held up a bank, train or even a stagecoach. Outside of his gunfighting days with the Regulators, his main criminal enterprise was rustling cattle on the New Mexico plains.

More commonly referred to as "Rose of the Wild Bunch," this outlaw was born around 1876 in Knickerbocker, Texas, and learned the outlaw trade by observing her bank-robbing father. Eventually hooking up with Butch Cassidy and his Wild Bunch, Bullion fenced money for the group and became romantically involved with several members. Most of those men died by the gun, but "The Thorny Rose" gave up her life of crime after serving time in prison and died a respectable seamstress in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1961.

Crazy Horse received a black stone from a medicine man named Woptura to protect his horse, a black-and-white pinto he named Inyan, meaning "rock" or "stone". He placed the stone behind the horse's ear so that he and his horse would be one in battle. He believed the sacred stone would protect him from bullets. Subsequently, Crazy Horse was never wounded by a bullet.

Eldridge Aver Burbank, who examined the Apache medicine man at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1897, wrote in his journal: "One day Geronimo came into my quarters at Fort Sill in a most peculiar mood. He told me no-one could kill him, or me either--if he willed it so. Then he bare himself to his waist. I was dumbfounded to see the number of bullet hole scars on his body. I knew he had been in many battles and had been shot dozens of times, but I never heard of anyone living with at least 50 bullet wounds on his body. Geronimo had that many scars. Some of these bullet wounds were large enough to rest a pebble in as Geronimo picked up pebbles and putting them in each wound he would make a noise like a gunshot--then take the pebble out and throw it to the ground ... and shout 'Bullets cannot kill me!'"

Calamity later claimed she was so upset by Hickok's murder that she went after his killer with a meat cleaver, having left her guns at her residence. According to historical accounts, however, her story is more fiction than fact.

At a March 1884 performance in St. Paul, Minnesota, sharpshooter Annie Oakley befriended the Lakota leader Sitting Bull who had defeated Custer eight years earlier at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Believing that Annie was "gifted" by supernatural means in order to shoot so accurately with both hands, the Native American chief sent $65 to her hotel with a request for an autographed photograph. "I sent him back his money and a photograph, with my love, and a message to say I would call the following morning," Oakley later recalled. "The old man was so pleased with me, he insisted upon adopting me, and I was then and there christened 'Watanya Cicilla,' or 'Little Sure Shot.'"

On February 3, 1889, two days before her 41st birthday, Belle was ambushed and killed while riding home from a neighbor's house in Eufaula, Oklahoma. According to legend, she was shot with her own double barrel shotgun. Suspects included her husband and both of her children, but the case was never solved.

Known as Stagecoach Mary, Mary Fields was one of the toughest and bravest women in American history. Fields was born into slavery around 1832 and freed after the Civil war. She would go on to work at convents in Ohio and Montana, where she ran a tight ship and became notorious for drinking, smoking, and toting guns. In 1895, she became the first African-American female star route mail carrier, delivering mail by stagecoach. Fields earned the nickname "Stagecoach Mary" for her speed of delivery and reliability. She was also known for being fearless in the face of stagecoach thieves and is rumored to have fought off a pack of wild wolves with a rifle.