The legend of the American Old West is a tapestry woven with threads of fact, fiction, and outright fabrication. While the names of Jesse James, Billy the Kid, and Wyatt Earp are etched into the collective consciousness, history has a way of forgetting the others—the desperate, the dangerous, and the damned who rode just as hard and fell just as far. A new deep-dive investigation into the era’s forgotten figures reveals a cast of characters whose violence, cunning, and sheer audacity rivaled—and often exceeded—that of their more famous contemporaries.
From a gunman who vanished into thin air after escaping prison to a one-man army who held off fifty hired killers for twelve hours, these are the outlaws, lawmen, and forgotten killers whose stories have been buried beneath the dust of time.
The first name to emerge from the historical shadows is Jesse Evans, a man whose life is a paradox of documented violence and phantom origins. Born in either Missouri, Texas, or Iowa—historians cannot agree—Evans arrived in New Mexico in the early 1870s and quickly became a central figure in the region’s criminal underworld. He rode with the infamous John Kinney, a former soldier turned cattle rustler, and later formed his own gang known as “The Boys.”
Evans’s resume reads like a catalog of frontier depravity: he shot up dance halls, rustled cattle, and helped spark the bloody Lincoln County War, a conflict that would immortalize his one-time friend and later enemy, Billy the Kid. According to historian Robert Utley, Evans’s offenses went beyond mere rustling. On New Year’s Eve of 1876, Evans and his cohorts, after being beaten in a brawl with soldiers, returned to the dance hall with blazing six-shooters, killing one soldier and a civilian instantly while wounding three others.
No charges were ever brought.
Evans’s path crossed with Billy the Kid’s in the fall of 1877, when the two rode together, stealing livestock from John Tunstall, a future employer of the Kid. The friendship, however, was as fleeting as it was profitable. When the Lincoln County War erupted, Evans sided with the Murphy-Dolan faction, a decision that placed him directly in opposition to the Kid and his Regulators.
Evans was instrumental in the murder of Tunstall, a killing that ignited the conflict. He was later wounded during a robbery attempt and captured, but was granted bail, a decision that allowed him to participate in the climactic Battle of Lincoln. According to biographer Grady McCright, Evans held a position of leadership during the battle, operating from the Dolan faction’s headquarters.
The war ended with both Tunstall and Sheriff Brady dead, but the animosity between Evans and the Kid remained a simmering ember.
In a bizarre twist, the two enemies attempted a peace treaty in Lincoln, a meeting that devolved into a night of heavy drinking. The peace was shattered when Evans’s associate, Bill Campbell, murdered attorney Houston Chapman in cold blood, shooting him at such close range that his shirt caught fire. The Kid, who witnessed the murder, fled town, and the two gunmen never saw each other again.
Evans’s reign of terror continued until he was captured by Texas Rangers in 1880 after a running gunfight in the Chinati Mountains. He was sentenced to ten years in the Huntsville State Penitentiary but escaped in May 1882, vanishing without a trace. Despite unconfirmed sightings in Texas, Arizona, and even a bizarre theory that he lived out his days as an old man in Florida under an assumed name, the true fate of Jesse Evans remains one of the Old West’s greatest unsolved mysteries.
While Evans’s story is one of ambiguity, the tale of Nate Champion is one of stark, brutal clarity. In the early 1890s, Wyoming was a powder keg. The wealthy cattle barons of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association (WSGA) controlled the territory’s political and economic landscape, viewing the influx of small homesteaders and independent ranchers as a direct threat to their power.
These “rustlers,” as the barons labeled them, were often just hardworking men trying to carve out a life on the open range. Champion, a Texas-born cowboy, was one such man. After working for the big outfits, he filed on a spread of his own, a decision that immediately branded him an enemy of the WSGA.
The cattle barons, backed by the governor and a network of corrupt politicians, decided to eliminate their opposition by force, hiring a small army of fifty mercenaries to invade Johnson County and murder Champion and other leaders.
The invasion culminated on the morning of April 9, 1892, when the hired guns surrounded Champion’s cabin. Inside were Champion, fellow cowboy Nick Ray, and two fur trappers. The trappers were allowed to leave, but when Ray stepped outside, he was riddled with bullets.
In a display of incredible bravery, Champion dashed out of the cabin under heavy fire, grabbed his wounded friend, and hauled him back inside. For the next twelve hours, the cabin was besieged by relentless gunfire. Champion, knowing his end was near, grabbed a pencil and documented the attack on paper.
“Nick is dead. He died about 9:00,” he wrote. “Boys, I feel pretty lonesome just about now.”
The mercenaries, unable to dislodge him with gunfire, resorted to setting the cabin ablaze with a burning wagon. Champion burst from the flames, guns blazing, and was cut down in a hail of bullets. His final note read, “The house is all fired.
Goodbye, boys. If I never see you again.”
Champion’s sacrifice was not in vain. His stand bought time for a messenger to reach the town of Buffalo, where a posse of 200 angry citizens was formed. The hunters became the hunted, and the mercenaries were forced to barricade themselves inside a ranch, surrounded by the mob.
They were only saved by the intervention of federal troops, summoned by the WSGA’s political allies in Washington. Despite the overwhelming evidence of premeditated murder, no one was ever convicted. The cattle barons returned to their estates, but their power was broken.
The public outrage led to a political shakeup, and the WSGA was forced to open its books to the small ranchers. Nate Champion, who lost the battle, ultimately won the war, becoming a symbol of resistance against corporate tyranny.
The story of Billy Brooks is a different kind of tragedy—a descent from lawman to outlaw that ended at the end of a rope. In 1872, the 22-year-old Brooks was appointed town marshal of Newton, Kansas, a notoriously violent settlement. He proved his mettle by pursuing a cowboy who shot him, chasing the man for ten miles despite suffering three gunshot wounds.
After recovering, Brooks moved to Dodge City, where he took on the role of an informal lawman and gambler. His tenure was marked by extreme violence. In a single month, he killed or wounded at least fifteen men.
His reputation as “Bully Billy” was cemented by a series of deadly altercations, including a shootout in a dance hall where he and a partner killed or wounded three cowboys. He was even suspected of murdering his own gambling partner, Matt Sullivan, though he was never charged.
Forced to leave Dodge City, Brooks returned to buffalo hunting and horse stealing, raiding the herds of Native Americans with impunity. His actions contributed to the escalating tensions that led to the Red River War. In 1874, he was implicated in a scheme to sabotage a rival stagecoach company by stealing its livestock.
When a posse came to arrest him, Brooks barricaded himself in his dugout with his girlfriend, Matilda, vowing not to be taken alive. He eventually surrendered on the promise of a fair trial, but that promise was broken. That night, a lynch mob overpowered the guards, dragged Brooks and two other prisoners to a bridge, and hanged them.
He was just 25 years old. His girlfriend, Matilda, purchased a coffin and wept over his body, but few others mourned the man who had demanded to be killed through his own violent actions.
Barney Riggs, another forgotten killer, had a career that spanned multiple states and a prison term. Born in Arkansas in 1856, Riggs killed his first man as a teenager, allegedly by accident. He fled to Arizona, where he became a horse thief and a cold-blooded murderer.
His most heinous act, according to his cousin, was killing two men and then returning to murder three women who had witnessed the crime. In 1886, he was sentenced to life in Yuma Prison for the back-shooting murder of a man who had bragged about seducing Riggs’s wife. His life sentence was cut short, however, when he saved the prison warden from a knife-wielding inmate.
Riggs was granted a full pardon on the condition he leave Arizona. He moved to Texas, where he became a deputy sheriff, but his violent temper continued to cause problems. He was involved in numerous arrests and gunfights, including a showdown with the notorious Jim Miller, whom he was not afraid to face.
In a saloon confrontation, Riggs, outnumbered two to one, coolly killed one attacker with a shot under the eye and pursued the other, shooting him in the back of the head. He was acquitted on self-defense grounds. Riggs’s life ended not in a blaze of glory, but in a squalid street fight in 1902, shot in the chest by his own stepson-in-law after a dispute over child support.
He died cursing his killer, a fitting end for a man whose life was defined by rage.
The final figure in this rogues’ gallery is Newman “Old Man” Clanton, the patriarch of the infamous Clanton family of Tombstone, Arizona. Born in Tennessee around 1816, Clanton moved west, eventually settling in Arizona in the 1870s. He established a legitimate ranch, but it quickly became a front for a criminal enterprise.
Clanton and his sons, Ike, Phineas, and Billy, became key links in a chain of horse and cattle theft that stretched from Mexico to Texas. They associated with a loose confederation of outlaws known as the Cowboys, who conducted violent raids south of the border. In July 1881, Clanton participated in an ambush on a caravan of Mexican smugglers in Skull Canyon, killing at least four people and making off with thousands of dollars in silver and livestock.
The Mexican authorities, enraged by the attacks, dispatched troops to hunt the raiders down. On August 13, 1881, Clanton and his party were camped near Skeleton Canyon when they were surrounded by a force of Mexican soldiers. A hail of gunfire tore through the camp, killing Clanton and most of his men before they could even react.
His death, just two and a half months before the gunfight at the O. K. Corral, removed the family’s patriarch and left his sons to face the Earps alone.
Contrary to popular myth, the Cowboys did not wear red sashes, a detail invented for the movies, but their brutality was all too real.
These forgotten men—Evans, Champion, Brooks, Riggs, and Clanton—represent the true, unvarnished reality of the American frontier. They were not romantic heroes but products of a brutal, unforgiving environment where life was cheap and violence was the ultimate arbiter. Their stories, long buried in archives and old newspaper clippings, serve as a stark reminder that history is not just the story of the famous, but also of the forgotten who shaped the world through their actions, both noble and despicable.
As the dust of the Old West continues to settle, the echoes of their gunfire remain, a testament to a time when the line between lawman and outlaw was often just a matter of who drew first.
