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Ah Chee Lo and her Daughter, 1905


Ghost Cowboy is about real tales from the 19th-century American frontier, when the Old West was young. Most of the posts here are actual news items from the 1800s and early 1900s. We'll be adding "new" content every week. Travel with us and sign up for an account, and you'll be able to leave comments and post in our forums. Your trailmasters, Ken in Alabama and Dave in Virginia, don't get to saddle up and vacation out west as often as they'd like, so they started this site. Drop us a note.

frontiersman


BURNED TO THE STAKE.


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From 1892, an example of an especially vicious lynching, and of the racist press that helped make it possible. Afterward, evidence came to light showing that Mrs. Jewell had in fact seduced the victim.

Fresno Weekly Republican / February 26, 1892

Horrible Fate of a Negro Ravisher.

THE VICTIM OF THE FOUL CRIME
Applies the Match and Thousands Watch the Brutal Wretch Cremate.

ST LOUIS, February 20. — The Republic’s special from Texarkana, Ark., says: Ed Coy, the negro fiend who last Saturday fiendishly assaulted Mrs. Henry Jewell, the wife of a respectable farmer living a few miles outside the city, this afternoon answered for his awful crime, being burned at the stake in the presence of 6000

Iron White Man


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Iron White Man of the Sioux Nation, probably a member of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Circa 1900 photograph by Gertrude Kasebier.

WHOLESALE HANGING.


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Galveston Daily News / September 8, 1875

At Fort Smith, Arkansas, on the 3d instant, six men were hung on one gallows. Among them were two who had made their homes in Texas.

Daniel H. Evans was a handsome young man of twenty, a native of Tennessee, and had respectable connections in Missouri, Tennessee and Texas. He murdered a man named Seabolt in November last near Eufaula, Creek Nation, and Evans admitted he associated with outlaws, and in connection with two others robbed a

Joe Black Fox


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Joe Black Fox, a Sioux Indian from Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Circa 1900 photograph by Gertrude Kasebier.

 

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