117 Fun Facts About Wild West

Billy the Kid, alias William Bonney, was probably born under what name?

Henry McCarty was probably his birth name; Antrim came from the man who became his stepfather, and William H. Bonney was a name he gave himself.

Which sheriff shot and killed Billy the Kid at Fort Sumner in 1881?

Pat Garrett waited in the dark in Pete Maxwell's bedroom at Fort Sumner on 14 July 1881 and shot the Kid as he walked in.

Billy the Kid rose to fame as one of the Regulators in which New Mexico conflict?

The Lincoln County War (1878) pitted the Regulators, formed to avenge the murder of English rancher John Tunstall, against the Murphy-Dolan faction.

The only authenticated photograph of Billy the Kid led people to believe he was what?

Left-handed: tintypes are mirror images, so his holster shows on the wrong hip, and a 1958 film was even titled The Left Handed Gun; the plate sold for $2.3 million in 2011.

Where did the 1881 Gunfight at the O.K. Corral actually take place?

A vacant lot on Fremont Street was the real site, not the corral itself; the Earps and Doc Holliday faced murder charges afterwards, but a judge ruled the killings justified.

About how long did the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral last?

30 seconds: some thirty shots were fired, leaving Billy Clanton and both McLaury brothers dead, while Ike Clanton ran for it.

The outlaw faction the Earps fought at the O.K. Corral is known today by what name?

The Cochise County Cowboys were a loose band of rustlers and smugglers; the shoot-out began when the town marshal tried to disarm them under a local ban on carrying guns.

Wyatt gets the fame, but which Earp brother was city marshal and led the lawmen at the O.K. Corral?

Virgil Earp was both city marshal and a deputy US marshal; two months after the fight, gunmen ambushed him and shattered his left arm, maiming him for life.

Before becoming a gambler and gunman, Doc Holliday earned a degree in what?

Dentistry was his trade: he graduated from the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery in 1872, but tuberculosis soon sent him west in search of drier air, where he turned to gambling.

Doc Holliday died in his bed at a hotel in which Colorado spa town?

Glenwood Springs drew Doc Holliday in 1887 because he hoped its hot springs would ease his tuberculosis. He died in bed at the Hotel Glenwood that November, aged 36, reportedly amused to find his boots off.

Wyatt Earp was accused of fixing an 1896 contest he officiated in which sport?

Boxing: as referee of the Fitzsimmons–Sharkey heavyweight fight in San Francisco, Earp gave it to Sharkey on a foul few had seen. He had also climbed into the ring wearing a revolver, and was charged for it.

What is unusual about Wyatt Earp's record across all his gunfights?

His brothers and his friend Doc Holliday were all hit; Wyatt walked away untouched every time.

Wild Bill Hickok was shot in 1876 while playing poker in which town?

Deadwood's Saloon No. 10 was where Hickok broke his own rule: he liked to sit with his back to the wall, but the only free chair faced away from the door, and Jack McCall walked up behind him and fired.

The 'dead man's hand' Hickok supposedly held when he died is traditionally what?

Black aces and eights are the hand of legend, but no account from 1876 records Hickok's cards. The link took hold fifty years later, through a 1926 biography.

What did Davis Tutt take from Hickok, sparking their 1865 Springfield duel?

A gold watch was the trigger: Tutt seized Hickok's pocket watch over a gambling debt and wore it in public, and their shootout in Springfield's town square followed on 21 July 1865.

Which Kansas cattle town made Wild Bill Hickok its marshal in 1871?

Abilene made him marshal in April 1871. That October he shot a gambler in a street shootout, then killed his own deputy by mistake, and the town dismissed him.

Who shot Jesse James in the back of the head in 1882?

Robert Ford, a gang member after the reward, shot James from behind in the outlaw's own home in St. Joseph on 3 April 1882. James's gravestone called his killer a traitor and coward not worth naming.

The James-Younger Gang fell apart after a botched 1876 bank raid in which Minnesota town?

At Northfield on 7 September 1876, townspeople shot back at the gang; the Younger brothers were captured two weeks later near Madelia.

Jesse and Frank James learned guerrilla warfare riding with which Confederate bushwhacker leaders?

William Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson led Missouri's fiercest guerrillas: Frank rode with Quantrill, and Jesse joined Anderson at 16, the year his men dragged unarmed Union soldiers off a train at Centralia and shot them.

The Pony Express carried mail between St. Joseph, Missouri and Sacramento in about how many days?

10 days was the scheduled time, kept by changing to a fresh horse at relay stations set every 10 to 15 miles along the route.

What killed the Pony Express after only about a year and a half?

The telegraph reached across the continent on 24 October 1861, and the Pony Express, which had never made money, was wound up within weeks.

Buffalo Bill Cody launched his famous Wild West show in which year?

Buffalo Bill's Wild West opened in Omaha, Nebraska in May 1883; from 1887 it toured Europe, where Queen Victoria saw it in her Jubilee year.

Buffalo Bill Cody earned his nickname in the 1860s by hunting meat for crews building what?

A railroad: in 1867 the Kansas Pacific hired Cody to keep its construction crews in buffalo meat, and the thousands of animals he shot in the next year and a half gave him the name.

Annie Oakley's real first name was what?

Phoebe Ann, as she was born in rural Ohio, shot game for market as a girl to support her widowed mother, and by 15 her earnings had paid off the mortgage on the family home.

Sitting Bull, her fellow performer, gave five-foot-tall Annie Oakley which nickname?

Little Sure Shot was Sitting Bull's name for her, Watanya Cicilla in Lakota: after watching her shoot in St. Paul in 1884, he symbolically adopted her as a daughter.

Calamity Jane's real name was Martha Jane what?

Canary was her family name, sometimes spelled Cannary. She lies beside Wild Bill Hickok: by one account at her own request, by another as the funeral planners' joke on a man who had no use for her.

Butch Cassidy's real name was what?

Robert LeRoy Parker, born in Utah in 1866, took 'Butch' from a spell working for a butcher in Rock Springs and 'Cassidy' from Mike Cassidy, the rustler who taught him the trade.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are believed to have died in a 1908 shootout in which country?

Bolivia is where two American bandits died in a shootout at San Vicente days after a mine payroll robbery. A 1991 dig there found no remains whose DNA matched the outlaws' relatives, so their end is unproven.

The Sundance Kid took his nickname from a town in which state?

Wyoming: in 1887 he took a horse, saddle and gun from a ranch near the town of Sundance, was soon caught, and picked up the nickname during his 18 months in jail.

The Colt Single Action Army revolver, adopted by the U.S. Army in 1873, is famous under what nickname?

Peacemaker was the name that stuck to the Army's standard revolver of 1873 to 1892. Samuel Colt never saw his company's most famous gun: he had died in 1862.

Chisholm Trail herds crossed which river out of Texas into Indian Territory?

The Red River was forded at Red River Station, the last stop in Texas. The long drive paid because a longhorn worth $4 or $5 at home could fetch up to $40 at a Kansas railhead.

Jesse Chisholm, namesake of the cattle trail, was of Scottish and which Native American descent?

Cherokee on his mother's side and Scottish on his father's, Jesse Chisholm was a frontier trader: herds followed the wagon road between his trading posts, but he died in 1868, before the drives reached their peak.

The Black Hills were reserved for the Lakota by an 1868 treaty signed where?

The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie reserved the Black Hills for the Lakota; Custer's 1874 expedition announced gold there and the rush overran it.

Dodge City, Kansas boomed from 1872 by shipping what, before the Texas cattle herds arrived?

Buffalo hides were the town's first trade, hauled in by hunters as soon as the tracks arrived. When the herds were gone, settlers gathered the bones and sold those too.

Which Kansas town had the first frontier 'Boot Hill' cemetery, before Dodge City?

Hays City's Boot Hill, in use from 1867, predates Dodge City's; the name evoked men who 'died with their boots on'.

Custer's defeat at the Little Bighorn in 1876 is known to the Lakota as the Battle of what?

The Greasy Grass was the Lakota name for the Little Bighorn River, where thousands of Lakota and Cheyenne had camped in defiance of an Army order to return to their reservations.

Comanche, long famed as the only survivor of Custer's command at the Little Bighorn, was what?

A horse: Comanche, a captain's mount, was found badly wounded two days after the battle and nursed back to health. Other cavalry horses lived too, but the victors had led those away.

Before the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull had a vision of soldiers falling into camp like what?

Grasshoppers: at a Sun Dance shortly before the battle, Sitting Bull cut his arms a hundred times, then saw soldiers falling into camp from the sky, which his people read as a promise of victory.

Sitting Bull was killed in 1890 by Indian agency police on which reservation?

Standing Rock: officials feared he would join the Ghost Dance movement, so police were sent to arrest him at his cabin, and he was shot dead when a crowd of his followers resisted.

Geronimo died in 1909 as a prisoner of war at which Army post?

Fort Sill, Oklahoma, was Geronimo's last prison. Still officially a prisoner of war, the old raider was put on show at fairs and exhibitions in his final years, and died there of pneumonia.

Although never a chief, Geronimo held what role among his Apache band?

Shaman, or medicine man, was his standing among the Apache, never chief. His decades of raiding began as revenge after Mexican soldiers killed his mother, his wife and his three children.

Under the 1862 Homestead Act, how long did settlers have to live on the land to gain title?

Five years of living on and improving a 160-acre claim earned the title for little more than a filing fee; about a tenth of all the land in the United States passed into private hands this way.

The Homestead Act was repealed in 1976, but new claims were still allowed for ten more years in which state?

Alaska was the one exception when Congress ended homesteading in 1976: claims there ran until 1986, so a law from the Civil War years was still handing out free land in the 1980s.

Lawman Bass Reeves insisted on pursuing which member of his own family for murder?

His son Bennie was charged in 1902 with murdering his own wife. Reeves insisted on taking the case himself, and Bennie was soon in custody, then convicted and sent to prison at Leavenworth.

Which fictional hero has been linked to Bass Reeves as a possible real-life inspiration?

The Lone Ranger has been linked to Reeves, a former slave turned feared lawman, because of parallels between the masked rider's adventures and his career; the claim is widely repeated and still debated.

Stagecoach robber Black Bart was famous for leaving what at two of his crime scenes?

Poems signed 'the PO8' were left at only two hold-ups, yet they made Charles Boles famous. He robbed Wells Fargo stages for eight years with a courtesy that won him the label of gentleman bandit.

What clue finally led detectives to Black Bart?

A laundry mark, F.X.O.7, was on a handkerchief Bart dropped as he fled his last hold-up, wounded. Detectives went from laundry to laundry in San Francisco until one matched it to a customer.

The Dalton Gang was wiped out in 1892 trying to rob two banks at once in which Kansas town?

Coffeyville's townsmen shot four of the gang dead on 5 October 1892. Only Emmett Dalton survived: freed after 14 years in prison, he went to Hollywood and made a living from his outlaw past.

After his lawman days, Bat Masterson spent his last two decades in New York City working as what?

A sportswriter for the New York Morning Telegraph, Masterson kept his column going until October 1921, when he died of a heart attack at his desk just after writing one.

Bat Masterson was born in which country?

Canada: Masterson was born in Quebec in 1853 and grew up on a string of family farms there and in New York and Illinois before the family reached the plains, where he left to hunt buffalo at 18.

Belle Starr, the 'Bandit Queen', was convicted in 1883 of what crime?

Horse theft brought Belle Starr a short term in a Detroit prison in 1883. The 'Bandit Queen' legend owed more to Richard Fox's Police Gazette, which sold her as a female Jesse James.

Joseph Glidden of DeKalb, Illinois patented the modern form of which frontier-changing product in 1874?

Glidden's 1874 patent for barbed wire fenced the open range; Texas fence-cutting wars followed until the state made cutting a felony in 1884.

Levi Strauss and tailor Jacob Davis received their 1873 patent for reinforcing work pants with what?

The 1873 patent covered copper rivets at the stress points of work pants; Davis, a Reno tailor, could not afford the fee and partnered with Strauss.

Henry Wells and William Fargo founded Wells Fargo in 1852 to serve which booming market?

Gold-rush California was the prize: Wells and Fargo opened in San Francisco in 1852 after the other directors of the express company they already ran balked at expanding to the West Coast.

The Pinkerton detective agency's open-eye logo came with which slogan?

We Never Sleep ran beneath the open eye on Pinkerton's Chicago office. In 1861 the agency reported a plot to kill Lincoln in Baltimore, and his route to Washington was changed.

Which Spanish word for a mounted cattle herder was anglicised in the American West as 'buckaroo'?

Vaquero comes from vaca, Spanish for cow. The herders of northern Mexico worked cattle from the saddle long before the Texas trail drives, and American cowboys grew out of their tradition.

In trail-drive slang, what was a 'remuda'?

A herd of spare saddle horses travelled with every trail crew; the name comes from the Spanish for 'exchange', because each hand picked his mounts from it and changed horses as the work required.

The Texas Rangers were founded in 1823 by which colonizer's call to arms?

Stephen F. Austin hired ten frontiersmen as 'rangers' in 1823, though the force was only formally set up in 1835. A century on, former Ranger Frank Hamer led the hunt for Bonnie and Clyde.

Gunfighter John Wesley Hardin studied in prison and took up which profession on release?

Lawyer: Hardin read law behind bars, was pardoned in 1894 and passed the Texas bar. In 1895 he went to El Paso to open a practice, and that August a constable shot him dead in a saloon there.

The first transcontinental railroad was completed with a ceremonial spike at which Utah site?

Promontory Summit saw Leland Stanford take a mighty swing at the last spike on 10 May 1869 and miss. The signal that the line was 'done' went out across the country anyway.

Prospector Ed Schieffelin named his Arizona silver claim after a warning that all he would find there was what?

His own tombstone was what he was told he would find in Apache country. He named his first silver claim Tombstone instead, and the mines there went on to yield $40 million or more.

Stagecoach operator John Butterfield co-founded which company with Wells and Fargo in 1850?

American Express was formed in 1850 when Butterfield, Henry Wells and William Fargo merged their rival express firms rather than keep fighting one another. His Overland Mail stages followed eight years later.

Roughly how many settlers lined up for the Oklahoma Land Run on April 22, 1889?

An estimated 50,000 people raced for 2 million acres of the Unassigned Lands at noon on 22 April 1889, at the sound of army guns and bugles.

Which leader is remembered for the 1877 surrender words 'I will fight no more forever'?

Chief Joseph gave up at Bear Paw, Montana, in October 1877 after the Nez Perce had fought their way more than 1,000 miles, only to be stopped about 40 miles short of the Canadian border.

The thousands of Black Southerners who migrated to Kansas around 1879 are known by which name?

Exodusters took their name from the biblical Exodus: for freed people leaving the South after Reconstruction, Kansas, where John Brown had fought slavery, looked like a promised land.

Which Montana vigilante group of cattlemen killed up to 20 rustlers and squatters in 1884 alone?

Stuart's Stranglers, led by rancher Granville Stuart, hanged or shot suspected rustlers along the Musselshell and Missouri rivers in 1884.

Which cheap, mass-printed adventure stories made Buffalo Bill a national hero before he ever staged his Wild West show?

Dime novels turned the young Army scout into a legend: writer Ned Buntline made him the hero of his tales, then in 1872 talked him into playing himself on stage, the start of Cody's life as a showman.

Which symbol of the Old West is really an invasive plant that arrived in the 1870s in flaxseed from Russia?

Tumbleweed is mostly Russian thistle, which appeared in South Dakota when imported flaxseed turned out to be contaminated. Once dry, the plant snaps off at the root and scatters its seeds as it rolls.

In the 1850s the US Army imported which animals as an experiment in hauling supplies across the American Southwest?

Camels landed in Texas in 1856 with the backing of Secretary of War Jefferson Davis. The Civil War interrupted the experiment, and the Army sold the animals at auction.

Which future US president ran a cattle ranch in Dakota Territory in the 1880s after his wife and mother died?

Theodore Roosevelt sank $14,000 into the cattle business and built Elkhorn Ranch north of Medora. He turned those years into three books on ranching and hunting.

Which author first signed his famous pen name in 1863 while reporting for a Virginia City, Nevada newspaper?

Mark Twain turned to journalism at the Territorial Enterprise after failing as a miner. His years in the West later became the travel book Roughing It.

Margaret Brown, whose husband struck it rich in the mines of Leadville, Colorado, became famous for surviving what?

The Titanic sinking earned her the nickname 'Unsinkable Molly Brown' after she urged the crew of Lifeboat No. 6 to turn back for survivors. The family's wealth came from the Little Jonny Mine in 1893.

Buffalo Bill's Wild West crossed the Atlantic in 1887 and gave a command performance for which European monarch?

Queen Victoria saw the show in London in her Golden Jubilee year and enjoyed meeting the performers. A second command performance followed for her visiting royal guests.

Most of the workers who built the Central Pacific Railroad across the Sierra Nevada came from which country?

China supplied some 12,000 of the railroad's laborers by 1868. Unlike white workers, who were fed at the company's expense, they had to pay for their own food.

Sharpshooter Annie Oakley, a star of Buffalo Bill's Wild West, was born in a log cabin in which state?

Ohio's Darke County is where she learned to shoot, hunting as a child to provide for her impoverished family. She came home in the end, dying in Greenville, Ohio, in 1926.

Settlers who slipped into Oklahoma's Unassigned Lands before the 1889 Land Rush began earned which nickname?

Sooners got their name from the 'sooner clause', which denied a claim to anyone who entered before the opening time. The University of Oklahoma's football team took the nickname in 1908.

Which word for an independent-minded rebel comes from a Texas landowner whose cattle roamed unbranded?

Maverick comes from Samuel Maverick, a Texas lawyer whose small herd was left to wander unbranded. Cowhands took to calling any unmarked stray calf a maverick.

Which visiting writer appeared at the Tabor Opera House in Leadville, Colorado, on an 1882 lecture tour?

Oscar Wilde brought his talks on the Aesthetic Movement to the silver boomtown. American newspapers were already caricaturing him as a dandy decked in sunflowers and lilies.

Wyatt Earp, the last survivor of the O.K. Corral gunfight, died at home in 1929 in which city?

Los Angeles put the old lawman near Hollywood, where he made friends with screen cowboy Tom Mix and other Western actors. He hoped they would get his story told on film.

One-armed Civil War veteran John Wesley Powell led a three-month river expedition in 1869 through which landmark?

The Grand Canyon run capped a trip down the Green and Colorado rivers, the first official government-sponsored passage. Powell had lost his right arm below the elbow at the Battle of Shiloh.

Which Missouri town, later home to President Harry Truman, was a famous jumping-off point for the Oregon Trail?

Independence was nicknamed the 'Queen City of the Trails' because three great overland routes set out from it. The first organized migrant wagon train formed there in 1836.

The sprawling 'Mystery House' in San Jose was built by the widow of a magnate from which frontier rifle company?

Winchester heiress Sarah Winchester designed the mansion's rooms one by one and supervised the building herself. It opened as a tourist attraction within a year of her death in 1922.

Which mountain man and Army scout, a dime-novel hero in his own lifetime, gave his name to Nevada's capital city?

Kit Carson became a frontier legend through news articles and wildly exaggerated dime novels. Carson City and the Carson River both carry the trapper and guide's name.

Which wagon train took the untested Hastings Cutoff in 1846 and was trapped by snow in the Sierra Nevada all winter?

The Donner Party lost so much time on the shortcut that it reached the mountains too late. Of its 87 members, 48 survived, some only by resorting to cannibalism.

The all-Black 9th and 10th Cavalry, formed after the Civil War to serve on the frontier, went by which nickname?

Buffalo Soldiers is a name the troopers are said to have been given by the Native warriors they fought. One museum account traces it to the Cheyenne in the winter of 1877.

Which Lakota war leader, who avoided cameras all his life, has been carved into a Black Hills mountain since 1948?

Crazy Horse refused to be photographed, so the giant portrait is imagined. The monument stands about 17 miles from Mount Rushmore and remains far from completion.

The Army's attempt to disarm a Lakota camp on December 29, 1890 ended in a massacre at which South Dakota site?

Wounded Knee Creek lies on the Pine Ridge Reservation, where the 7th Cavalry surrounded the camp with a battery of four Hotchkiss mountain guns in support.

Which hit 1903 Edison Western, long mislabeled the first of its genre, was filmed in New Jersey and New York?

The Great Train Robbery was shot by Edwin S. Porter in November 1903 and was widely distributed and copied. Later legend wrongly crowned it the first Western, or even the first film with a plot.

Which disease killed up to 3 percent of Oregon Trail travelers in the epidemic years between 1849 and 1855?

Cholera spread because thousands of wagon parties shared the same campsites with no sewage treatment. The travelers had no idea it came from contaminated water.

On the treeless Great Plains, Oregon Trail families gathered dried bison dung, nicknamed 'chips', to use as what?

Cooking fuel was so scarce without trees that collecting chips became a regular chore, one that often fell to the women of the wagon train. The Platte River valley offered a steady supply.

Which church president, sometimes called the 'American Moses', led the Mormon pioneers west to the Salt Lake Valley?

Brigham Young succeeded Joseph Smith and quizzed trappers and mountain men about the Great Basin before choosing it. About 70,000 people eventually made the journey.

Mountain men like Jim Beckwourth ranged the Rockies between 1820 and 1840, making a living by trapping which animal?

Beaver pelts drew about 3,000 trappers into the mountains at the trade's peak. Their living had largely gone by the late 1840s, undone by the fur trade's collapse and the rise of silk.

Allan Pinkerton, whose detective agency pursued Butch Cassidy across the West, was born in 1819 in which country?

Scotland's Glasgow was his birthplace: he trained there as a barrel maker and joined the Chartist reform movement. He later claimed to have foiled an 1861 plot to kill Abraham Lincoln.

The North American cowboy's gear and methods descend from which mounted cattle herders of colonial Mexico?

Vaqueros worked cattle in New Spain with methods brought over from Spain, and became the foundation for the cowboy. Great Basin cowhands still call themselves 'buckaroos', possibly a corruption of the word.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid robbed Union Pacific trains around 1900 as members of which outlaw gang?

The Wild Bunch took its name from an earlier outlaw gang. With detectives closing in, Cassidy and Sundance fled in 1901 to Argentine Patagonia.

Roy Bean, the Texas saloon-keeper judge styled the 'Law West of the Pecos', named his bar after which actress?

Lillie Langtry, the British stage star known as the Jersey Lily, gave the Jersey Lilly saloon its name. In her autobiography she said she visited only after his death.

Which card game, not poker, was played in almost every Old West gambling hall and nicknamed 'bucking the tiger'?

Faro got the nickname from early card backs that showed a Bengal tiger, and some houses hung a tiger picture in the window to advertise a game. Poker overtook it only in the early 20th century.

Which Black Texas cowboy invented bulldogging, the rodeo skill of wrestling a steer to the ground by its horns?

Bill Pickett's method was to bite the animal on the lip and fall backward. In 1972 he became the first African American man inducted into the National Rodeo Hall of Fame.

Which dime novelist made Buffalo Bill Cody the hero of an 1869 serial and later put him on stage in a play?

Ned Buntline first planned to make Cody a sidekick to Wild Bill Hickok, then decided the scout was the more interesting character. The serial began running in the New York Weekly in December 1869.

Which Texas rancher invented the chuckwagon in 1866 by refitting an Army-surplus wagon for a cattle drive?

Charles Goodnight built the rolling kitchen to feed cowboys driving cattle from Texas to New Mexico. He became known as the 'father of the Texas Panhandle'.

Which Central Pacific Railroad president, later founder of a famous university, drove the golden spike in 1869?

Leland Stanford tapped the spike into a tie of polished laurel with a silver maul. It is now displayed at the university he and his wife Jane founded and named after their late son.

Which painter of cowboys and cavalry, born in upstate New York, sculpted the 1895 bronze 'The Bronco Buster'?

Frederic Remington made it his first sculpture, and it remains the most popular of them all. He specialized in Western subjects despite being born in the town of Canton, New York.

Which religious movement, begun in 1889 by the Paiute prophet Wovoka, promised an end to westward expansion?

The Ghost Dance grew out of the traditional circle dance. Wovoka taught that practicing it properly would reunite the living with the spirits of the dead and bring peace and prosperity to Native peoples.

The frontier 'Hanging Judge', who sentenced 160 people to death, held court in which Arkansas border town?

Fort Smith's federal court also had jurisdiction over the neighboring Indian Territory, the future Oklahoma. Of the 160 people the judge sentenced to death, 79 were executed.

Because the Conestoga was too heavy for the long trek, Oregon Trail families used which lighter covered wagon?

Prairie schooner covers of white canvas reminded travelers of a ship's sails crossing a sea of grass. Many were simply ordinary farm wagons fitted with a cover.

In the slang of cowboys on a Texas cattle drive, a 'dogie' was which kind of animal in the herd?

A motherless calf was a dogie in cowboy slang, a term first recorded in 1887. Where the word came from is uncertain.

Buffalo Bill Cody won which decoration as an Army scout in 1872, lost it in 1917 and had it restored in 1989?

The Medal of Honor was rescinded from Cody and 910 others in 1917; civilian scouts were ruled ineligible because they were neither officers nor enlisted soldiers. An Army review board restored his in 1989.

Which Oglala Lakota chief gave his name to an 1860s war that closed the Bozeman Trail and its Army forts?

Red Cloud's alliance of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Northern Arapaho won control of the Powder River country. He later led his people into reservation life and became one of the most photographed Native leaders of his century.

Which alias was outlaw Jesse James living under in St. Joseph, Missouri, when he was shot dead in 1882?

Thomas Howard was the name he lived under with his family in St. Joseph. He was killed in that house by a new gang recruit who hoped to collect the reward on his head.

Which Indiana outlaws staged America's first peacetime train holdups, starting at the Seymour depot in 1866?

The Reno brothers and an accomplice boarded their first target as it pulled out of the station one October evening. Vigilante mobs ended the outfit's short career in 1868 by lynching ten members.

Big Nose Kate, longtime companion of gunfighter Doc Holliday, was born in which European kingdom?

Hungary was her homeland: she was born Mária Izabella Magdolna Horony and emigrated to America with her family as a child. In the American West she was known as a gambler.

The Concord stagecoach, slung on leather thoroughbraces, was first built by Abbot-Downing in which state?

New Hampshire's capital, Concord, gave the coach its name. The leather suspension let the body sway instead of jolt, absorbing shocks on rough ground and easing the ride for passengers.

Which woman became notorious in 1899 for holding up an Arizona stagecoach on the road between Globe and Florence?

Pearl Hart committed one of the last recorded stagecoach robberies in the United States, and it was her gender that made the crime national news. She was held in Yuma Territorial Prison and later pardoned.

Which outlaw was accidentally decapitated at his 1901 hanging in New Mexico because the rope was too long?

Black Jack Ketchum was caught after a conductor shot him in the arm as he approached a moving train; the arm had to be amputated. He was executed for attempted train robbery.

Which 1902 Owen Wister novel about a ranch cowboy was a landmark in lifting the Western above the dime novel?

The Virginian never gives its cowboy hero a name. Wister built the novel out of short stories he had published in Harper's Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post.

Which wilderness became the first national park in the US under an act President Ulysses S. Grant signed in 1872?

Yellowstone is also widely understood to be the first national park in the world. The act set the land apart as a public park for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.

Which frontiersman served Tennessee in Congress, opposed the Indian Removal Act and died at the Alamo in 1836?

Davy Crockett vehemently opposed many policies of President Andrew Jackson during his time in Congress. He joined the Texas Revolution in early 1836, the last venture of his life.