Outlaws & Crime

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Title Article Type Author
Averell, Jim, newspaper reporting of the lynching of Encyclopedia Tom Rea

When Noah Richardson brought his gal to a gathering of cowboys in 1905, he expected her to leave with him. The charm of Allie Means that day won him the girl but lost him his life. Read more about the desperate crimes of Noah Richardson and the chain of events spurred on by the murder of Allie Means.

In 1878, the enterprising Otto Franc described Wyoming as “the finest & wildest country . . .  abounding with fish & game.” From conflicts with rustlers through the beginnings of irrigation and the end of the open range, his huge Pitchfork Ranch came to dominate Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin.

On the evening of January 11, 1907, Eastern Shoshone Tribal Councilman George Terry was murdered after leaving a council meeting. Was it a crime of passion, perhaps revenge for mistreating his wife Kate Enos? Or was it an assassination, retribution for backing the selloff of half the reservation’s tribal lands?

In 1894, newspapers across Wyoming filled with stories of jobless men headed east along the railroads. Coxey’s Army, they were called, named for their “general.” All were unemployed, many were hungry, but they were bound for the center of the nation’s power. It became the first march on Washington.

After midnight on December 12, 1917, three men took Wade Hampton, a Black man charged with attempting to rape three white women, from his Rock Springs jail cell at gunpoint. Less than an hour later, Hampton was dead.

Lifelong criminal James Costin forged checks, passed them, stole money from his employers and coyote pelts from a ranch. In April 1933, though he only drove the getaway car, he masterminded a bank robbery in Green River. Later, he sued the men who tried to shake him down for the loot.

A Winchester rifle at the Sweetwater County Historical Museum reportedly belonged to Wild Bunch member Bub Meeks, who participated in the famed Montpelier bank robbery, escaped prison twice and an insane asylum once and after a final scrape with the law died in 1912 in the Wyoming State Hospital. 

In October 1903, six Oglala Lakota Sioux and two white men died in a tragically unnecessary armed confrontation on Lightning Creek, northeast of Douglas, Wyo. But 35 years later, both sides made a public effort at a kind of reconciliation—at the Wyoming State Fair.

It began with a bowl of mush and ended in the murders of two men—one shot through the heart, the other dragged from the jail and lynched by a vicious mob of 300 to 400 people. Afterward, no one would testify to who was in the mob.

In 1904, a Laramie mob hanged African-American Joe Martin from a light pole near the courthouse, drawing a crowd of 1,000 people or more. Despite having called several witnesses, a grand jury brought no indictments. And lynchings of Black men became more and more frequent in Wyoming in the coming two decades.