Some argue that our modern times are more violent than ever.  That children weren't exposed to the kinds of horrors seen in today's society, back in the "old days."  After reading "homicides and their causes" below, I suggest that we have come a long way in changing the way justice is handled by the courts but are much the same when it comes to human cruelty.

I'm always hearing how there just aren't enough police to keep crime down "nowadays."  Well, just imagine having the nearest law enforcement 100 miles or more away.  That's the way it was in the wild, wild, west and one reason why it was so wild "back in the day."

Moses "California Joe" Milner, who scouted at age 17 during the Mexican War, boozed himself out of a job when in 1868 Custer made him chief scout of the Seventh Cavalry.  Milner celebrated by getting so drunk he had to be hogtied and returned to camp lashed to a mule.  Custer sacked him--but continued to rely on the scout's experience and expertise.
 

Tom Tobin

This masterful tracker once stalked a pair of murderers for five days, then showed up a Fort Garland, Colorado, with their heads in a sack.  Tobin loved the life of a scout and clung to his frontier buckskins long after more civilized garb was commonly available.  Here he wears a colorful melange of Eastern and Western clothing.

Nicknamed "Peaches" because of his light rose complextion, this Cibecue Apache led General George Crook's command into the Sierra Madre to breach the mountain sanctuary of a band of Chiricahua Apaches--including Geronimo himself.  The venture proved the wisdom of the old Southwest proverb: It takes an Apache to catch an Apache.

Jim Bridger

Founder of Fort Bridger, a vital trading post on the Oregon Trail, this walking atlas of the West was the first white man to encounter the Great Salt Lake and to explore the Yellowstone area.  A legendary raconteur, he once held a party of Sioux and Cheyenne spellbound for an hour--using only silent sign language.

One year after fighting at the Little Bighorn, the Cheyenne chief helped negotiate a treaty with the government.  Later, as a valued scout for the army, he puzzled at the ways of whites "The white man eats and drinks all the time." he noted.  "The Indian drinks when he finds water and eats when he kills game."

Will Comstock

Custer's favorite scout, Comstock had lived among the Cheyenne and other Indians, who knew him as Medicine Bill and told how once he bit off a squaw's poised finger to save her from a rattlesnake bite.  He carefully hid his real identity: grandnephew to James Fenimore Cooper, whose romantic tales of the "noble savage" were derided on the Plains.

Born in Arizona to a Mexican mother and a part-Indian, part-Irish father, Free was kidnapped and raised by Apaches.  Later he reveled in helping the army outwit the Indians he had grown to hate.  They despised him in turn--as did his army comrades, one of whom once described him as "half Mexican, half Irish and whole son-of-a-bitch."