Tom Horn, Range Detective

By the time Tom Horn arrived in Wyoming in the mid-eighteen nineties, he had already lived several lives. He had scouted for the army during the Apache Wars, served as an interpreter, tried ranching, lost cattle to thieves, and worked for the Pinkerton Detective Agency before that organization, by some accounts, pushed him out in eighteen ninety-four. He was a skilled tracker and a formidable presence, and the Wyoming Stock Growers Association hired him as a range detective at a time when cattle theft was both real and frequently exaggerated.

On July eighteenth, nineteen hundred and one, a fourteen-year-old boy named Willie Nickell was shot and killed near his family's homestead at Iron Mountain, seventy miles north of Cheyenne. Willie's father Kels Nickell raised sheep, which put him in chronic conflict with neighboring cattle ranchers. Deputy Marshal Joe LeFors brought Horn in for a conversation in January of nineteen hundred and two, a meeting that was recorded by a shorthand stenographer hidden in the next room.

In what became the trial's central evidence, Horn allegedly told LeFors that the shot was three hundred yards, calling it the best shot he ever made and the dirtiest trick he had ever done. Horn maintained the confession was misrepresented and that he had been drinking. The jury convicted him in October of nineteen oh two.

Horn was hanged in Cheyenne on November twentieth, nineteen oh three, one day before his forty-second birthday, on a water-powered gallows designed by a man named Julian. He never identified who, if anyone, had hired him. The question of whether he killed Willie Nickell has not been definitively resolved by subsequent research.