The Scary Life That Was “Normal” in The Wild West
Howdy, partner. We have all dabbled in 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 a rootin’ tootin’ cowboy shooting era, one family in Kansas made the gruesome play Sweeney Todd look like child’s play. Welcome to Nutty History, and today let us find out all the weird things that were normal for the Wild West.
Viewer discretion is advised for this video, as some of this content may be offensive or disturbing. We, the makers of this video, in no way support or condone the actions of the subjects featured.
The year was 1872, and the place was Labette County, Texas. Among the many families that purchased land in the newly formed county were the Bender family. For a year, the German family was respected by everybody in town.
Thanks to the alleged daughter of the family, Kate Bender had been popular as a psychic and spiritual healer around the place.
The Bender family 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, 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.
Practitioners of spiritualism believe in the spirit of the dead continuing to live on after death and in communicating with the departed spirits. Believers of the sect often practice 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, delivered with a fluent and 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 Bender’s inn suggest that the main motive behind the Benders’ crimes was money, because 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 the 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 Bender’s property, York’s party found a total of 11 bodies, all being slain in quite a similar fashion.
A manhunt was immediately launched for the sick family, but no trace was found of them except an abandoned wagon. There is a good possibility that America’s first serial slayers were never captured and lived the rest of their lives 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 a gun. The other was with a camera and a lot of preparation.
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, as the body would begin decomposing 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 66 years to find his resting place after being taken down by a group of sheriff’s deputies in October of 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 explosive training that he used in his criminal career. After failing as a safe cracker, he robbed two trains in Oklahoma and paid with 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 were not even aware that the prop was an actual corpse and not a wax dummy. It was during 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 outperformed men in other male-exclusive aspects of the Wild West, such as marksmanship. The name Annie Oakley was a respected name, and she was considered somewhat of a superstar of the 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 17 years.
Annie Oakley 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. One of them even earned the nickname Poker Alice because 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 she knew how to create a facade 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 she 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 involved in the business of escorting customers most of the time.
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 three to one, 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. Now, 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 women. In Nevada, Delamar was a small town of 1,500 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 Delamar, which means half the town home saw the death of their male figure. This earned the town an unwanted nickname: the Widow Maker.
The mill was finally taken down 16 years later, but the damage was done. One by one, every family moved away from the town, and in 1934, Delamar 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.
