Early Life & Career
Dalton was born in Kansas. For a time, he was one of the two success stories of the Dalton family, for a time being a member of the California legislature. His older brother Frank Dalton was a highly respected Deputy US Marshal. However, by 1890 he was tired of politics, and joined his brothers in a train robbery outside Los Angeles, California. He and his brother Great Dalton were captured, but later escaped. When his brothers were killed in the infamous 1892 raid on Coffeyville, Kansas, Dalton moved to Oklahoma, where he met Bill Doolin, and the two formed their own gang. They called the gang by two names, the Doolin Dalton Gang and the Oklahombres, but it became best known as the Wild Bunch.
Bill Dalton became obsessed with becoming more famous than his brothers, and he and Doolin went to great efforts to see that happen. For three years they committed bank robbery, stagecoach robbery, and train robbery in various places around Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Kansas. On September 1, 1893, they were trailed to Ingalls, Oklahoma and became involved in the Battle of Ingalls, during which he shot and killed Deputy US Marshal Lafeyette Shadley. Bill Dalton decided to leave the Doolin Dalton gang and form his own Dalton Gang. On May 23, 1894, Dalton and his new gang robbed the First National Bank at Longview, Texas. This was the only job by the gang. Various posses would kill three of the members and send the last one to life in prison. On June 8, 1894, a posse tracked Dalton to his home in Ardmore, Oklahoma. He leaped from a window with a pistol in his hand and charged the posse, ignoring orders to halt; the posse opened fire, killing him. His wife identified his body, and had him shipped back to California for burial.
Read more about this topic: William M. Dalton
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“In early days, I tried not to give librarians any trouble, which was where I made my primary mistake. Librarians like to be given trouble; they exist for it, they are geared to it. For the location of a mislaid volume, an uncatalogued item, your good librarian has a ferret’s nose. Give her a scent and she jumps the leash, her eye bright with battle.”
—Catherine Drinker Bowen (1897–1973)
“I have no doubt that they lived pretty much the same sort of life in the Homeric age, for men have always thought more of eating than of fighting; then, as now, their minds ran chiefly on the “hot bread and sweet cakes;” and the fur and lumber trade is an old story to Asia and Europe.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)