Clayton, New Mexico: Where Black Jack Lost His Head

Clayton, the county seat of Union County in northeastern New Mexico, was platted in eighteen eighty-seven and the Fort Worth and Denver City Railroad reached it the following year. It became a cattle shipping town and a rough place to do business. Its most famous episode came on April twenty-sixth, nineteen oh one, when the outlaw Tom Ketchum, known as Black Jack, was hanged in the town plaza for felonious assault upon a railroad train.

The execution became notorious for a grimmer reason than the crime: the hangman miscalculated the drop, and the rope decapitated Ketchum. The botched execution was photographed and remains one of the most reproduced images of Old West justice. Ketchum had spent the years before his capture robbing trains across New Mexico and Texas, losing an arm to a conductor's shotgun on his final attempt before being arrested, tried, and brought to the Clayton gallows.