Cowboy Adventures During the Wild West

 The Wild West

The Wild West refers to the period from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to around 1900.

It tells the stories of the pioneers, the settlers, the cattle kings, gold mining, railroads and steamboats, the cowboys, Indians, outlaws and gun slingers.

Famous characters of the Wild West include Whyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Bat Masterson, Billy the Kid, Calamity Jane and Belle Starr.

After the first European settlers arrived in America, many move westward seeking a new life and the promise of prosperity.

The West offered land, good soil for farming and new opportunities to get rich that could not be done in the East.

The Two-Fisted Town Tamer

Thomas James Smith, also known as "Bear River Smith" (12 June 1830 - 2 November 1870), was a lawman in the American Wild West and a marshal of cattle town, Abilene, Kansas.

Smith was a quiet-spoken lawman with a rugged reputation who came from New York City, where he worked as a police officer.

While working as a police officer in New York City in 1868, Smith was involved in the accidental killing of a fourteen-year-old boy, after which he resigned.

He also served as a lawman in small towns in Wyoming, Bear River and in Kit Carson, Colorado.

Marshal of Abilene

Abilene, Kansas, was a wild cattle town with numerous saloons, brothels and lawlessness.

From 1867, crime had increased to the point where murder and shootings were a regular occurrence.

Tom Smith was commissioned as Deputy US Marshal to bring law and order to Abilene in 1869 and insisted that he could enforce the law by using his fists rather than using guns.

Soon after taking office, Smith overpowered both, "Big Hank" Hawkins and "Wyoming Frank" and banished them from Abilene, after beating them both at the same time using only his bare hands.

Smith also introduced a "no guns in the town limits" law which was extremely unpopular.

Over the next two months, Smith survived two assassination attempts.

His tough reputation and several arrests of law-breakers led him to become widely respected and admired by the citizens of Abilene.

On the 2nd of November, 1870, Smith and a temporary deputy went to serve a warrant to Andrew McConnell and Moses Miles about the murder of another Abilene citizen.

They located the suspects ten miles outside of Abilene where a gunfight erupted.

Smith was badly wounded in the chest and his deputy fled the scene.

Moses Miles then took an axe and decapitated Tom Smith.

McConnell and Miles were captured and arrested in March 1871.

Andrew McConnell got 12 years in prison and Moses Miles spent 16 years and released.

Tom Smith was buried in Abilene, and a huge tombstone was erected with a plaque to honor his service in Abilene.

Smith was replaced as marshal by legendary lawman and gunfighter "Wild Bill" Hickock.

Ronald Reagan, as the host of the syndicated western television series, Death Valley Days, played Smith in the 1965 episode "No Gun Behind His Badge".

Colter's Run

John Colter (c.1770-1775 - May 7, 1812 or November 22, 1813) was a mountain man and explorer who was a member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1803 to 1806 commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson, to explore and map the newly purchased American Northwest from Napoleonic France, and beyond after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803.

Colter also became the first person of European descent to enter the region which later became Yellowstone National Park and to see the Teton Mountain Range during the winter of 1807-1808.

Blackfeet Indians

In 1809, Colter teamed up with John Potts, another former member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition to trap for beaver for the lucrative fur trade near the Jefferson River in what is now Montana when they encountered several hundred of the dreaded Blackfeet Indians while traveling by canoe.

The Blackfeet demanded they come ashore.

Colter complied and was disarmed and stripped naked.

Potts refused and was shot and wounded.

Potts then killed one of the Indian warriors and was immediately riddled with arrows fired by the Indians from the shore.

His body was then brought to shore and hacked to pieces.

Run-For-Life

After the Blackfeet deliberated how to kill Colter, the chief decided to allow him to run for his life and to be chased by the Indians with spears.

They took him to a nearby plain and gave him a three to four hundred yard start.

Colter, knew that he must outrun the Blackfeet if he had any chance of surviving.

He started his run-for-life across the plain and had out-paced the Indians except for one who was about twenty yards behind him.

Determined to avoid the expected spear-throw, he suddenly stopped, turned around, and spread out his arms.

The surprised Indian, too exhausted from running, fell when he tried to throw his spear.

Colter immediately snatched up the spear and killed him then, continued his run with the rest of the Indians following at a distance.

Colter reached the Madison River, five miles from his start, and hid under driftwood near a beaver lodge.

He could hear the yells of the Blackfeet, who looked up and down the river to find him.

He waited till night, then climbed out and walked completely naked and frozen, toward a trader's fort.

Colter became weaker from hunger and exhaustion, surviving only on roots and bark and had bloodied feet from prickly cactus thorns piercing his feet.

Miraculously, Colter reached Manuel Lisa's Fort within seven days where he was greeted by his friends.

After a few weeks when he regained his strength, he headed back to Blackfeet country that winter to collect the traps he had left behind.

John Colter lived five more years after his incredible run, dying of jaundice in Missouri, where he lies in an unmarked grave.

Alexander Todd

Former clerk, Alexander Todd got gold fever so, he went to California to seek his fortune.

He soon realized that he didn't have the physical stamina to endure the backbreaking work at the gold fields in the freezing rivers of the Mother Lode (rich source of an ore or mineral).

However, it didn't take him long to find opportunities to make money without having to pan for gold.

California Gold Rush

California had grown fast with the gold rush that getting a letter from San Francisco to the Mother Lode country was difficult.

The federal government was shipping mail to California by way of the Isthmus of Panama, a route that was as lengthy and uncertain for the mail service as it was for the Forty-Niners (gold seekers in the California gold rush of 1849).

Todd scoured the mining camps and signed up hundreds of lonely miners who yearned for word from home.

The nearest post office was in San Francisco which was a two-week trip there and back.

The miners couldn't leave their claim that long so they signed-up for the mail service.

On July 14, 1849, Todd began carrying mail to the San Francisco post office charging $2.50 a letter and an ounce of gold, $16 for personal delivery of any mail that he found for addresses in the mining camp.

On his first trip, he delivered $150,000 in gold for some merchants to a company in San Francisco and was paid $7,500.

When Todd handed the clerk at the San Francisco post office the long list of names, the clerk swore Todd in as a postal clerk so he could search the stacks of letters himself charging twenty-five cents for each letter he found.

That didn't bother Todd because he had discovered another way to make money.

He bought old New York newspapers for a dollar each and sold for $8 back at the gold fields.

Another money-making business he introduced was packing gold from the mining camps to deposit in San Francisco in exchange for five percent of its value.

Everything he Did Turned to Gold

Without having to touch a pick or a shovel, Alexander Todd made a fortune using good old American ingenuity.

Charles Marion Russell (1864 - 1926)

Charles Marion Russell, "the cowboy artist," storyteller and author (also known as C. M. Russell, Charlie Russell, and "Kid" Russell) was born in St. Louis, Missouri on March 19, 1864.

He was an artist of the American Wild West who created more than 4,000 works of art during his lifetime, working in paint, bronze, ink, and wax of cowboys, Indians, and landscapes, set in the Western United States and in Alberta, Canada.

Russell loved the "Wild West" and would spend hours reading about it and enjoyed speaking to explorers and fur traders who came through Missouri.

He learned to ride horses at Hazel Dell Farm near Jerseyville, Illinois, on a famous Civil War horse named Great Britain from Col. William H. Fulkerson, who had married into the Russell family.

At the age of sixteen, Russell left school to follow his dream of the Wild West as a cowboy on a sheep ranch in Montana then, moved on to work with Jake Hoover, a hunter and trapper who had become a rancher.

From Hoover, he learned much about life in the Wild West and they remained lifelong friends.

In 1882, at the age of eighteen, Russell worked as a cowboy for a number of outfits in Montana.

It was in 1885 when he began to work as an artist.

During the winter of 1886-1887 while working on the O-H Ranch in the Judith Basin of Central Montana, he painted a number of watercolors.

When the ranch foreman received a letter from the owner, asking how the cattle had weathered the winter he sent a postcard-sized watercolor that Russell had painted of a haggard steer being preyed by wolves under a gloomy winter sky.

The ranch owner showed the postcard to friends and business acquaintances and eventually it was displayed in a shop window in Helena, Montana giving Russell his first taste of publicity and to receiving commissions for new work.

His watercolor, "Waiting for a Chinook", became one of his best-known works.

Native American Culture

In 1888, Russell gained valuable knowledge of Native American culture when he spent time with the Blood Indians, a branch of the Blackfeet.

He became an advocate for Native Americans and supported the Chippewa to have a reservation established for them in Montana.

In 1916, Congress passed legislation to create the Rocky Boy Reservation.