Saddle Up for This Wild West Quiz

Davy Crockett, the legendary frontiersman, led a storied life in the Wild West. He served in the Tennessee militia, fought in the Texas Revolution, and died at the Battle of the Alamo. In a 1954 song titled “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” Crockett is called the “king of the wild frontier.” (The moniker reappeared in the 1955 Western film by the same name.) The song helped establish Crockett’s legacy as an icon of the Wild West.

“Roughing It,” published in 1872, is Mark Twain’s semi-autobiographical account of his adventures in the American West. In typical Twain fashion, many of the stories are exaggerated for comedic effect, and include accounts of the author’s time prospecting for gold in the Nevada Territory, as well as a visit to the newly established Salt Lake City.

In 1869, Wyoming introduced a bill granting women in the territory the right to vote, as well as the right to hold public office. This was the first instance of women’s suffrage in the entire United States. In 1890, when Wyoming officially became a U.S. state, its constitution guaranteed women’s right to vote, thus making Wyoming the first state to legalize women’s suffrage.

Robert LeRoy Parker, aka “Butch Cassidy,” was the leader of a gang of outlaws known as the Wild Bunch. Between 1889 and 1900, Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch robbed more than $200,000 (about $2.5 million today) from banks, trains, and mining payrolls. Cassidy’s life of crime finally came to an end in 1908 when he was gunned down with his accomplice Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, aka the “Sundance Kid.”

The Oregon Trail stretched for 2,170 miles from the Missouri River in Independence, Missouri, to the Willamette Valley in Oregon. The grueling route crossed prairies, deserts, and mountains in the American West. The first people to make the treacherous journey along the Oregon Trail were fur trappers around 1811, and by the 1890s the trail had been traversed by hundreds of thousands of travelers.

The “vaqueros” were world-renowned cattle herders originating in Mexico. The skills and traditions of the Mexican vaqueros, including their in-depth knowledge of cattle behavior, throwing a lasso, and riding a horse with first-rate skill, were all passed down to the cowboys of the American West.

According to Wild West legend, when the gunslinger Wild Bill Hickok was shot in the back during a poker game, he was holding two black eights and two black aces. This poker hand has since become known as the “dead man’s hand.” Hickok was killed in the town of Deadwood, and to this day the Deadwood police department uses the two-pair hand as an insignia on its uniforms.

In 1885, Lakota warrior and spiritual leader Sitting Bull became a performer in the traveling event known as “Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show.” During his time with the show, Sitting Bull toured the world, befriended famed sharpshooter Annie Oakley, and even met U.S. President Grover Cleveland. However, hostile crowds made life on the road difficult, and Sitting Bull left the show after just one season.

Frontier lawman Wyatt Earp is a famous figure of the early American West. When Dodge City Mayor Lawrence Deger tried to close the town’s Long Branch Saloon, its owner called on Earp and a small posse of gunslingers to resist the order. The mayor threatened violence, but Earp and his gang refused to back down. The conflict lasted for months and became known as the “Dodge City War.”

The word “jerky” comes from “ch’arki,” a Quechua word meaning “dried meat.” Spanish explorers learned about the preserved food from the Quechua, an Indigenous tribe from the Andes mountains in South America, and brought it with them into North America, where its long shelf life made it a popular food among cowboys on long cattle drives.

The Lone Ranger was born on the radio, but when the Wild West adventure made the leap to TV and film, the challenge was to cast exactly the right white horse. As Lone Ranger lore goes, he rescued a courageous white stallion from a fight with a buffalo, but decided to set it free after displaying such bravery. The horse was named by the Lone Ranger’s sidekick, Tonto, who admired the stallion’s pure white coat, glistening like silver in the sun.

Although played with a standard deck of cards, faro is more akin to keno than poker. The game was easy to understand and had very low house odds, so it spread quickly across the Old West. Unfortunately, those low odds were frequently aided by dealers employing tricks to increase the house edge. The “Hoyle’s Rules of Games” book once included a disclaimer warning that no honest game of faro could be found in the United States.

Nearly a decade after Henry Ford’s Model T automobiles hit the streets, people living out West (and their valuables) still got around by stagecoach, leaving them vulnerable to robbery. The last documented stagecoach robbery was in 1916, by a man named Ben Kuhl. Kuhl was caught after a stray dog he befriended was found digging up the ransacked mail pouches that were buried after the heist. Kuhl was arrested and convicted using the help of a bloody palm print — the first time such a print was used to convict a killer.

Born an enslaved man in Arkansas, Bass Reeves was forced to join the Confederate Army, where he became a proficient shot. He managed to escape into the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) where he learned the ways and languages of the Seminole and Creek tribes. After the war, his skills earned him a spot as the first Black U.S. marshal west of the Mississippi, and some argue his illustrious career was the inspiration for “The Lone Ranger” depicted in radio, TV, and film.

Brothers Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan Earp, along with their friend Doc Holliday, served as the law enforcement of the city of Tombstone, Arizona. Together, they sought to disarm a gang of outlaw ranchers called the Cowboys. After an intense 30-second battle that saw 30 gunshots, three Cowboys had died while the Earps survived with only minor injuries. The shootout, which took place outside a horse corral, became one of the most famous legends of the Wild West.

One of the most famous names to come out of the Old West, Buffalo Bill Cody hoped to parley the fortune he’d made as a scout-turned-showman into a massive irrigation system in Wyoming later in his life. Unfortunately, he didn’t know anything about irrigation and the project was a disaster, but the town that sprang up around it flourished. Today, Western enthusiasts still flock to Cody, Wyoming.

Although the Pony Express achieved a lasting impact on the American popular imagination, the company itself only operated about 18 months (from April 1860 to October 1861) before going bankrupt. The horseback mail delivery system had drastically reduced the time it took to send messages cross-country, but it couldn't quite compete with an even faster mode of communication: the telegraph.

A graduate of the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery, John Henry “Doc” Holliday was driven to warmer, drier climates by a bad case of tuberculosis. He set up a successful dental practice in Dallas, Texas, but began drifting between frontier towns as he found drinking and poker preferable to pulling teeth. His hard-living ways and health problems eventually caught up to him, and he died of tuberculosis at age 36.

Although barbed wire was first patented in 1868, businessman and farmer Joseph Glidden built a better cow trap six years later. His design was simple and could be produced cheaply, which was a big plus for settlers. Allowing farmers to easily encase their vast acres of land, “the devil’s rope” effectively closed off the open range. Cattle drives could no longer easily pass through unfenced territory.

The sobriquet “Little Sure Shot” was given to professional sharpshooter Annie Oakley by Hunkpapa Lakota chief Sitting Bull. In the late 1800s, Oakley spent 17 years touring with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, which included a trip to England, where she earned praise from Queen Victoria.

After years terrorizing the American West, outlaw Butch Cassidy and his partner in crime the Sundance Kid — whose real name was Harry Longabaugh — fled to Argentina in 1901 along with the Sundance Kid’s girlfriend, Etta Place. Though they laid low for several years, they resumed robbing banks in 1905 before meeting their demise in Bolivia on November 6, 1908.

As the final resting place for those that “died with their boots on,” Boot Hill provided impromptu graves for people who came to a sudden end without means for a proper burial. The first Boot Hill was in Dodge City, Kansas, but the bodies were moved in 1880 to facilitate the building of the area’s first school.