Howdy Pardner! We all have dabbled into fantasizing about wearing spur studded boots
and pulling out a make-believe six-shooter from our sides at least once or twice in our prophetic
lives. The age of the wild west was an adventurous and unpredictable time in history that has
immortalized itself in our imaginations. But do you know that it was not just wild but also weird?
Despite being described as the rooting-tooting cowboy shooting era, gun control was stricter than
today and a family in Kansas made the gruesome play Sweeny Todd look like child’s play. Welcome
to Nutty History and today let’s find out all the weird things that were normal for the Wild West.
The year was 1872 and the place was Labette County, Texas. Among many families that
purchased land in the newly formed county were the Benders Family. For a year, the German family was
respected by everybody in town, thanks to the alleged daughter of the family. Kate Bender had
become popular as a psychic and spiritual healer around the place. Pa and Ma Bender also fashioned
their home as an inn which became the center of the town for visitors and residents alike.
But when the guests arriving at the inn stopped returning outside, their neighbors began talking.
Despite their reputation, there were whispers about the family from the moment they had arrived
and began building their home slash inn. In fact, there were rumors about the entire community that
settled in Labette County. Records show that the majority of the early settlers were spiritualists
who were known to believe in unorthodox things for their time. Kate Bender quickly earned merit
around the community as she showed signs of being “touched.” Practitioners of spiritualism believe
in the spirits of the dead continuing to live on after death. And to communicate with the departed
spirits, believers of the sects often practiced séances. Kate’s sermons and stunts convinced the
community in town that she was a psychic and a healer who had the power to talk to the dead.
Interestingly, Kate’s relationship with the rest of the Bender family is unclear, as some believe
she was the daughter of the Benders while the rest argue that she was the wife of their son
John. While Kate was gaining fame among the spiritualistic residents with her sermons
of free love with fluent verbose delivery, people found John disturbing. He had tendencies to laugh
aimlessly, had a weird speech pattern, and often behaved erratically which earned him the title
of the town’s half-wit. But Kate was able to spin John’s behavior in her psychic narrative as well.
She was also the face of the inn, which helped the business with people often visiting the inn
just to meet her. This also made her the chief suspect in the nefarious deeds that the Benders
committed in their inn. To date, nobody knows the definitive number of people who never left
the Bender Family inn and most likely lost their lives at the hands of the Benders.
The corpses found buried in the mass grave in the basement of the Benders inn suggest that the main
motive behind Benders’ crimes was money. As the bodies were found stripped of their valuables
and clothes. Yet, given that the majority of their victims were identified as poor,
experts believe that the Benders just enjoyed doing what they did!
Their bloody streak came to an end similar to the plot of Hitchcock’s movie Psycho as Colonel York
started investigating around town about them. Colonel York’s brother had gone missing after
visiting Bender’s inn. Although the Benders accused Native Americans of his disappearance.
When York managed to gather enough evidence against the Benders, he returned to the inn to
confront them but he found the house deserted. He and his associates did find a trap door
covered in crimson stains in the basement. After more thorough investigations on the Benders’
property, York’s Party found a total of eleven bodies, all being slain in a quite similar
fashion. A manhunt was immediately launched for the psycho family but no trace was found
of them except the abandoned wagon. There is a good possibility that America’s first serial
“slayers” were never captured and lived the rest of their lives well enough in the wild west!
In the movie “Zombieland,” Columbus advises in his survival guide for a Zombie Apocalypse to always
double tap the undead to make sure they stay down. In the real wild west, bounty hunters would
also double tap the outlaws twice, but only one of those shots was with the gun. The other was with a
camera and a lot of preparations. Gangs and notorious outlaws were plenty during the age of
the wild west. After committing a crime these outlaws would attempt to hide in remote areas
to escape the law. Often Bounty hunters would still catch up to them and bring them to justice
dead or alive. Only the former was a little harder to prove, because many times it would
be difficult to identify the dead because it would begin desecrating before completing the journey.
This wasn’t a profitable venture for the bounty hunters as townspeople wanted proof
that the criminal indeed paid for his crimes. Not to mention, the authorities wanted to make
an example out of the dead outlaws to scare away wannabe lawbreakers from their town.
This is why the invention of the camera obscura drew the attention of the bounty hunters.
With photography, Bounty Hunters were able to generate evidence for completing the job.
Also, with a little bit of showmanship, they could please authorities by adding flair to the pictures
of the dead outlaw before they were tossed six feet under. But not every outlaw was lucky to
get a proper timely burial. In the case of Elmer McCurdy, he had to wait for sixty-six years to
find his resting place after being taken down by a group of sheriff’s deputies in October 1911.
While McCurdy lived an infamous life, his deceased body gained some fame and became the star of a
carnival. Born in Washington, McCurdy had a rough childhood as the son of an unwed teenage mother
and tried many vocations before turning to crime. He was a plumber, a miner, and then a soldier in
the army where he received explosives training that he used in his criminal career. After failing
as a safe crack, he robbed two trains in Oklahoma and paid for his life in the confrontation
with authorities. Somehow over the years, his embalmed corpse found its way to Queen’s Park,
also known as The Pike amusement park, in Long Beach, California, where he was displayed as a
hanging prop. The staff at the park weren’t even aware that the prop was an actual corpse and not
a wax dummy. It was during the shooting of the tv series The Six Million Dollar Man, that a member
of the crew was attempting to move the body when an arm fell off and revealed a bone. The corpse
was turned over to authorities who identified it and returned it to Oklahoma to give it a burial.
Some women outperform men in other male-exclusive aspects of the wild west as well such as
marksmanship. The name Annie Oakley was a matter of respect and she was considered somewhat of a
superstar of Wild West when it comes to shooting. Not only did she beat expert marksman Frank Butler
in a shooting match in 1875, but she was also a major attraction of the Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
Show. For seventeen years she amazed audiences with her ability to split cards on the edges,
shoot the corks off of bottles, and put out candles with a shotgun.
But not all women used their prowess with the gun for good. Pearl Hart was the second woman to rob
a stagecoach and the first to survive while doing so. After leaving her first husband Pearl arrived
in Arizona and married Joe boot. When the couple failed to make money in mining, they turned to
stagecoach robbery and would have gotten away with it if they wouldn’t have got lost in the desert.
They were arrested and Pearl spent 18 months incarcerated. Interestingly, some women could
also make a lot of money on the table by playing cards alone. One of them even earned the nickname
‘Poker Alice,’ for she was considered the best poker player in the whole Wild West!
Known for smoking cigars, wearing flashy expensive dresses, and knowing the deck of cards inside out,
Alice Ivers was notorious for her skills at the poker table. Experts believe that she was good
at counting cards and knew how to create a façade on the table to fool her opponents.
She would use catchphrases like “Praise the Lord and place your bets, and I’ll take your
money with no regrets!” and often walked away from the table with her purse full of chips.
It is speculated that her total winnings were more than a quarter of a million dollars!
Contrary to popular belief, the majority of women in the wild west were not indulged in the “oldest
profession in the world.” In fact, women had quite a varied life in the wild west from being
a mother and wife, owning businesses, practicing medicine, and some were even infamous outlaws.
Even the saloon girls were not most of the time involved in the business of escorting customers.
They were mostly well-cultured and educated women who were making an honest living working
as servers and they were expected to be treated with respect. There is no doubt that the wild
west was a lonely place to be a man. In most towns, men outnumbered women 3 to 1 but it was
worse in California where the divide was nine to one. So even though women were doing daytime
jobs in these saloons, their presence drew an audience. That is why saloon girls were hired
for their artistic expertise to sing and dance in saloons and entertain the patrons. Pretty much
like how artists perform in restaurants today. But sometimes they were also asked to join patrons at
the table to socialize and play cards with them. Keep in mind that patrons had to still treat them
like proper ladies and tip or commission them generously. In fact, the commissions made as a
saloon girl were so good, that there were not many reasons to choose the “other” career in a saloon.
But not all of the wild west was such a fairy tale for a woman. In Nevada, Delmar was a small town
of fifteen hundred with a hospital, a school, multiple saloons, and a gold refinery. It was
after the gold refinery mill was built in 1893 that the town’s troubles started. The refinery
exposed miners and the townspeople’s lungs to silicon dust and it claimed a number of lives
in quick succession. At its peak, the town had as many as 400 widows living in Delmar which means
half the townhomes saw the death of their male figure. This earned the town an unwanted nickname,
The Widowmaker! The mill was finally taken down sixteen years later but the damage was done.
One by one every family moved away from the town and in 1934 the town was completely abandoned. Do
you have any more weird facts to share about the Wild West? Share them with us in the comments,
and do share and like the video. Thanks for watching yet another Nutty History video.