20 Ridiculous Stories From The Wild Wild West That Actually Happened

There is more than one photo of Geronimo wielding a rifle. Indeed, one particular image featured on a 29-cent U.S. postage stamp issued in 1994. But the powerful medicine man wasn’t always handy with a long gun – before he came to lead his people he was inexperienced with firearms. Rather, his main weapon of attack was the knife, but he had a particular and deadly way of using it. 

In one clash with some Mexican soldiers, Geronimo used his clever tactic to great effect. He ran at the enemy, dodging from side to side to avoid their fire. Once he came upon a rifleman he finished him off with his knife, grabbed his victim’s gun and sped back to his comrades. He then gave his prize to one of his compatriots who knew how to use the weapon. A formidably smart fighter indeed.

Perhaps the single most-storied event of the entire Wild West era, the Shootout at the O.K. Corral was not quite all that Hollywood would have us believe. In the classic 1957 movie Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, the actual shooting went on for five minutes – so we have the idea of a prolonged gun battle. But that is simply not what happened.

The gunfight was vicious enough, but the whole thing was over in just 30 seconds. In that time some 30 shots had been fired. In the aftermath three men lay dead, all opponents of Wyatt Earp and his brothers, and his ally Doc Holliday. It was an undoubtedly deadly affair, but it was more of a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it confrontation than a protracted gunfight.

The Old West had plenty of horses, mules and oxen, but camels? Surely not? Well, it turns out that the humped animals were roaming the prairies and that was actually thanks to the U.S. Army. In the mid-1850s army representatives travelled to the Middle East, bought 75 camels, and shipped them back to the U.S. Proponents of the scheme apparently believed the animals would be ideal beasts of burden in the uncharted territories of the West.   

The camels were used for a time by the army, but as the years passed they became dispersed, with some simply wandering off into the desert. Eventually what remained of the army herd was sold off. Those camels that had freed themselves from human ownership wandered the desert for a few decades. But they seem to have died out by early in the 20th century. So, sadly, wild camels are no more in the deserts of the West.

The splendidly named Elmer McCurdy was a two-bit bandit who came to a sticky end. Along with his gang he held up a train in Oklahoma in 1911. But it was the wrong train. Consequently, all that McCurdy was able to make off with was $46 and some spirits: two jugs of whiskey to be precise. Hardly a handsome haul! The inept McCurdy then hightailed it to a farmstead hideout. Unfortunately for him, a sheriff’s posse was hot on his trail. He was shot and killed in the subsequent fracas.

That should have been the obscure outlaw’s finale. But it wasn’t. Two men claiming to be McCurdy’s brothers took his body. But they were imposters, actually carnival men. The dead bandit, apparently mummified by some weird embalming concoction, now embarked on a posthumous career as a macabre fairground attraction. Then, in 1976 a crew filming on location for The Six Million Dollar Man stumbled upon the gunslinger’s mortal remains at the Nu-Point Amusement Park in Long Beach, California. Finally, McCurdy was buried the next year in Guthrie, Oklahoma.

The heyday of alien sightings and UFOs may have been in the 1950s and ’60s. But long before that folks in the Wild West were reportedly experiencing some mighty strange phenomena. We can go back to the township of Lodi, California, in 1896 for one such incident. Meet Colonel H.G. Shaw and his buddy Camille Spooner. They were on the road, on their way to Stockton, when something deeply disturbing happened.

As the story goes, their horses were the first to react, standing stock still, rigid with terror. As well they might, since three weird beings had suddenly appeared as if from nowhere. By the account of Shaw and Spooner, the creatures were exceptionally tall, covered in a weird fuzz and had huge eyes and tiny mouths. Even scarier, the three tried to grab the two humans. Fortunately, they failed. Otherwise we wouldn’t have the details of this marvelous story, would we?

Annie Oakley is remembered for her extraordinary feats of sharpshooting which made her an internationally famous figure in her own time. Her legend persists to this day. Still, there’s one tale about her that’s much less widely known: the story of how she met perhaps the most important character in her life. 

He was none other than her future husband, Frank Butler, himself an excellent shot. Oakley was just 15 when she first encountered him at a shooting contest in Cincinnati. Butler fired first, hitting 24 targets from 25. Not bad at all – but the peerless Oakley hit all 25. Both smitten, they married a year later in 1876 and stayed together for half a century until Butler’s death.

Born in 1786 in Tennessee, Davy Crockett was an outstanding frontiersman. He went on to become one of the most eminent politicians of his day, both in his home state and on the national stage. His legendary status was cemented by his heroic death in defense of the Alamo in San Antonio in 1836.

But whatever Crockett’s achievements, they certainly weren’t based on a rigorous childhood education. For the truth is that, aged 13, he had a scanty four days of formal schooling. By his own account, he skipped out of school after administering a drubbing to a classmate who’d been bullying him. Soon after that, the youngster absconded with a team of cowboys, never to darken the doors of a classroom again. 

Railroad managers, you’d imagine, work hard to avoid their locomotives crashing into one another. After all, rolling stock is expensive and relatives of train crash victims have an annoying habit of suing. But one man, a Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad Company employee, took an entirely different view. William Crush decided that it would be a great idea to crash two locos head-on. With the backing of the railroad company, Crush found two 35-ton engines near retirement.

A special track was built near Waco, Texas, and the scene was completed with lemonade stands, a restaurant and a bevy of carnival stalls. Around 40,000 attended the event in September 1896. Steaming along at 50mph, the two trains duly smashed into each other. Unfortunately, the locomotives exploded, showering the crowd with red hot metal and boiling water. Two died and many were injured. But for the railroad company the mad stunt was actually a success. The publicity saw its fortunes greatly increased in the following years.

For the British, the year 1887 was a highly significant one for it marked Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, 50 years on the throne. You might think that had little or nothing to do with the Wild West. But Buffalo Bill Cody was the man to prove you wrong. Because in that very year the impresario packed up his show lock, stock and barrel and shipped it across the Atlantic to London, England. 

Some 200 performers, 180 horses and a range of livestock from elk to buffalo made it “across the pond”, with the journey enlivened by a terrifying two-day storm. And it seems Buffalo Bill’s magnificent show attracted the Queen’s attention – so much so that she asked Cody for a private performance “by royal command.” The Queen and her entourage occupied a royal box while the rest of the auditorium, capacity 40,000, lay empty. By all accounts, Victoria was enthralled by the spectacle. 

The tragic tale of the Donner Party’s journey west when many perished in the winter snows of the Sierra Nevada in 1846 and 1847 is well known enough. But less familiar is the tale of how a letter played a central part in their grim fate. It was a message that they never read. If they had, they might well have avoided their calamitous journey.

The Donners’ ordeal can be traced to the decision to leave the main trail west and take a turning known as Hastings Cutoff. That was supposedly a shortcut, but it led the group to disaster. Ironically, a journalist called Edwin Bryant had written a letter to one of the Donner party’s leaders, James F. Reed. In it, he warned that the Hastings Cutoff should certainly be avoided. But Jim Bridger, proprietor of a Wyoming trading post, never passed the missive on, and the result was catastrophe.

Alice Ivers Tubbs was said to have been born in the peaceful rural county of Devon in western England in 1851. Her father was a straight-laced schoolteacher who took his family to America while Alice was still a youngster. Once settled in Virginia, Alice was packed off to a private boarding school. Yet despite that eminently respectable upbringing, Miss Tubbs was to become a Wild West legend. The source of her fame? Her uncanny abilities at the poker table.

Apparently Poker Alice, as she came to be called, learned her craft in the rough-and-ready milieu of the silver-mining boomtown of Leadville, Colorado. There she met and married Frank Duffield, himself an inveterate gambler and learnt all she needed to know from him. Sadly, he died in a mining mishap in 1876 and Tubbs then decided that the best way to earn her living was at the card table. She was highly successful but it wasn’t always easy. In one incident she confronted a cheat with her loaded pistol. He returned her money, reputedly $1,500. 

Bass Reeves was born into slavery in 1838 and brought up in Arkansas and Texas. He worked as a water carrier and field worker for his master, farmer William Reeves. When the Civil War broke out the farmer’s son, George, joined the Confederate Army and took Reeves with him as his valet. Details are murky, but at some point during the war Reeves freed himself from slavery by abandoning his master and escaping to the Indian Territory in modern Oklahoma.

Clearly a resourceful character, Reeves purchased land in Arkansas and prospered as a farmer, finding the time to marry and raise ten children. He also had a part-time job as a scout for the U.S. Deputy Marshals. Eventually this led to his appointment as a deputy marshal in 1875. He soon began to build a formidable reputation for his success in capturing outlaws hiding out in the Indian Territory. It’s said that he arrested as many as 3,000 fugitives, and gunned down 14 of them.

Wyatt Earp is one of the best-known of the Wild West’s illustrious lawmen. So it comes as quite a surprise to learn that he himself was on the wrong side of the law more than once. In 1871 alongside two others, Earp stole two horses, a serious offence in the Old West. The owner apprehended the thieves and Earp ended up in jail but was released on bail on a $500 bond. Electing to avoid the inconvenience of a trial, Earp absconded. It seems he never did face justice on that charge.

But that wasn’t the complete sum of Earp’s criminality. In 1872 Earp and his brother Morgan were arrested for being aboard a floating bordello in Peoria, Illinois. For that misdemeanor, he was fined $20. Just six months later, he was fined another $44 for the same offense. In fact, some historians have actually claimed Earp was really a pimp. Yet in 1876 he went on to become a Dodge City deputy sheriff.

John Sutter immigrated to America from Switzerland, arriving in California in 1839. There he carved out a successful career as an entrepreneur and trader at his property, Sutter’s Fort in what was Mexican territory at the time. Then in 1848 the unfortunate Sutter’s life was changed forever: one of his men, a carpenter, stumbled across gold in a stream on Sutter’s land. 

Sutter tried to keep the find secret but word got out and spread like wildfire. His own workers abandoned their jobs to hunt for the yellow metal. And thousands of others poured into California in search of wealth, devastating Sutter’s land in the process. As a result, Sutter was bankrupt by 1852 and never gained a single cent from the riches discovered on his property.

Allan Pinkerton, once a deputy sheriff in Cook County, Illinois, founded the Pinkerton Detective Agency in 1850. It shot to fame in 1861 by foiling assassins whose target was President Abraham Lincoln. The agency won a rather less salubrious reputation for its extensive involvement in anti-union activities such as violently suppressing a strike by steelworkers in Homestead, Pennsylvania, in 1892.

In fact, by then Pinkerton had already been dead for eight years. But his two sons, William and Robert, had ably carried on the work of the agency. In fact it was incredibly successful. So much so that by the 1890s it had 2,000 full-time detectives and 30,000 reservists on its books. In 1898, the U.S. Army had around 28,000 men. So at least in theory, Pinkertons had more men at its disposal than did the nation’s military.

Calamity Jane, or Martha Jane Cannary, is said from an early age to have taken on what were regarded as manly attributes. She’s remembered as a rough, tough character who could ride, shoot and raise Hell with the best of them. Yet it seems that she also had gentler traits which are seldom included in the tales about this exceptional woman. 

It turns out that Calamity Jane had qualities that made her ideally suited to nursing the sick. That was particularly true for those who were suffering from that deadly scourge of the 19th century, smallpox. She had contracted a bout of the disease as a child, meaning she had immunity. When an epidemic of smallpox hit the township of Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1878 Calamity Jane was on hand to nurse the sick back to health.

Daniel Boone, probably the ultimate American frontiersman, was traveling along the Licking River in Kentucky 1778 when one of the most extraordinary incidents of his eventful life unfolded. A band of Shawnees came across Boone and his companions and took them into captivity. Boone now found himself at their mercy at an encampment in Ohio.

But things actually took a turn for the better for Boone. Instead of harming him, a Shawnee chief called Blackfish took a liking to him. The upshot was that Blackfish adopted Boone to replace his own son who had been killed. Boone was renamed Sheltowee – Big Turtle – and may even have had a Shawnee wife. But after four months, Boone took his opportunity to escape, presumably to his new father’s regret. 

Doc Holliday assured his place in Wild West lore by being one of the players at the O.K. Corral  shootout in 1881. But why was he called Doc? Was he even really a doctor of any kind? Well, he wasn’t a practicing medic, but he was qualified in one branch of healthcare. In fact, John Henry Holliday was an 1872 graduate of the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery.

Holliday actually pursued his profession for a time in Dallas, Texas, but only briefly. The Britannica website has it that he soon discovered his true vocation as a gambler and a drifter, and abandoned dentistry. He wandered around the Old West, played his part at the O.K. Corral, and ended his days in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, in 1887.

With names like Taos Lightning, Red Dynamite and Forty Rods, hard liquor back in the Old West could be deadly. And we don’t mean it simply might make you dead drunk, although that was true enough. No, the outcome of drinking some of the concoctions available in saloons could literally be fatal. “Choose your poison” wasn’t just an invitation to order a drink. It was a statement of fact.

For some of the liquor labeled as whiskey or gin actually came with a shot of strychnine. Tarantula Juice, apparently a favorite beverage in the rough mining towns of the Sierra Nevada, was one such. A generous shot of that was said to cause lockjaw and convulsions. And a burial ground in California’s Ragtown was said to contain many who’d succumbed to the local whiskey. Unsurprisingly, the place is now a ghost town.

The Bender family of Labette County, Kansas, earned themselves the macabre distinction of being some of America’s earliest serial killers. Of German origin, the four-strong family, mom, pop and two children, established a general store and inn in Labette in 1871. But their neighbors soon noticed something strange: people kept disappearing without explanation.

Eventually, suspicion led the local folks to the Bender inn. A thorough search of the property and the surrounding land uncovered the mutilated remains of 11 people, or 15 depending on which source you choose to believe. Two versions of what happened next exist. In one, the Benders fled, escaping justice. In another, they were apprehended and put to death by an outraged posse. It was a turn of events straight out of a Hollywood western, though the movies have gotten plenty wrong about this era.

True cowboys never fully-loaded their six-shooter pistols. Instead, they’d use a “Cowboy Load” and only put in five rounds, leaving one chamber empty. This was because the guns were extremely finicky in the 1800s and were known to randomly fire.

Bank robberies weren’t that popular of a practice. More of these crimes occurred within a year in Dayton, Ohio, than ever across the Wild West. We’re guessing there weren’t canvas bags with dollar signs printed on them either.

The Wild West had gay rights! It was incredibly common for cowboys to be in same-sex relationships with one another — some even getting married. Their peers accepted these partnerships. Now this is something Hollywood should make into a movie.  

There used to be feral camels in Texas. For some reason (boredom, maybe) the U.S. military established the Camel Corps in 1856 and imported 66 camels to the arid state. After the Civil War, they were sold to circuses or escaped into the wilds. Their last sighting was in 1941.

The true Wild West only lasted for about 30 years. From 1865-1895, the American West was a rough place, filled with cowboys, outlaws, and general mayhem. The region eventually calmed down, but remained a difficult place to live for many years.

The boots weren’t just for show — they helped keep cowboys safe. A raised heel kept a frontiersmen’s foot safely in his horse’s stirrups. If the rider happened to fall, the lack of shoelaces would keep him from being dragged across the desert.

Surprisingly, there weren’t many quick-draw duels. The famous one between Wild Bill Hickok and Davis Tutt occurred on July 21, 1865, over a gambling debt. Though Bill won the encounter, he was still tried for manslaughter, but was acquitted.

About 25% of cowboys were Black — better known as the “Forgotten Cowboys.” These men were forced into laborious tasks, like taming horses and getting them ready for their riders. Black cowboys were also forced to travel in front of parties to ensure the rest of the group could comfortably ride on a trail.

American cowboys copied their look from Mexican vaqueros. They also got the famous word “buckaroo” from them too. Cowboys who weren’t fluent in Spanish mispronounced vaquero, turning it into buckaroo.

Black Bart was a famous outlaw, but he was also known for being polite. When he robbed company stagecoaches, he only stole money from the business and left the passengers' personal belongings alone — kind of like a Wild West Robin Hood.

If you were a cowboy moseying up a saloon for some drinking and gambling, you probably wouldn’t be playing poker. Faro was a far more popular card game at the time and would remain so until the early 20th century.

Contrary to every John Wayne movie, the Wild West enforced strict gun control laws. Citizens were often required to check-in their rifles with the local police stations when they entered towns. It’s like a coat check, except for guns. Convenient!

Gunslingers weren’t called gunslingers in the Wild West. Instead, townsfolk referred to them as “shootists” … definitely not as catchy as gunslingers. That term wasn’t invented for another 50 years.

The oldest state law enforcement agency opened during this time period. In 1835, the Texas Rangers were formed and still operate today. Now they’re selected by the Department of Public Safety.

Cowboys were literally boys in charge of cows. The invention of barbed wire assisted in putting the majority of them out of jobs. These sharp wires created a large, confined space for livestock, eliminating the need for them.

This probably is the least surprising fact: the towels hanging around saloons were disgusting. They were communal towels. Any patron could use these filthy rags to wipe beer from their face. Gross.

Most of the women who lived in the Wild West were thought to be sex workers, but this myth was perpetrated by male writers creating sexualized female characters for their male leads to save.

Elmer McCurdy wasn’t a good bandit, but in death, his body was a national attraction. He was embalmed and added to a traveling carnival’s sideshow. Elmer’s body moved to several locations for almost 60 years before finally being buried in 1976.

Broncho Billy Anderson, star of the groundbreaking 1903 epic, The Great Train Robbery, wasn’t a real cowboy. After the success of that 1930s film, he decided to go all-in with his Broncho persona and starred in a multitude of Westerns during his career.

Historians thought Billy the Kid was left-handed because he was photographed with his gun belt on his left side. His gun, a Winchester Model 1873 lever-action rifle, only loaded on the right, which would make it nearly impossible for a southpaw to operate.