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, early, life and/or career:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead.”
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips;Mnot be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. The symbol of an ancient man’s thought becomes a modern man’s speech.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I’ve been in the twilight of my career longer than most people have had their career.”
—Martina Navratilova (b. 1956)