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Unfortunately, no one claimed the outlaws
body, and was the custom of the time, Bob had to pay for his burial.
In April, 1890, both Bob and Grattan Dalton were sent
to Claremore, Oklahoma to arrest a man named Alex Cochran who had
killed U.S. Deputy
Marshal Cox. When they came upon a rider who fit the description
of the fugitive, they began to follow him, who quickly tried to
outdistance himself from the deputies. When the man would not stop, Bob
shot both the horse and rider from a distance of some 300 years.
Unfortunately, the dead man was not Alex Chochran, but his son.
Bob continued to work in the Osage Nation
under the Wichita court for a time. However, rumors soon began to abound
that he and Emmett were selling whiskey to the Indians and the Dalton
brothers were involved in a noisy disturbance with the natives. When U.S.
Commissioner Fitzpatrick received word of these events, he called in Bob
Dalton, demanded his badge and discharged hims from service. An
angry Bob insisted that he resigned claiming that court had cheated him
out of several expenses. In any event, in
1891, Bob, Grattan and Emmett
traveled to California, where they robbed a Southern Pacific Railroad of $60,000
and began a life of crime.
With
Bob as their leader, they soon formed the
Dalton Gang, recruiting a number of
outlaws, which included
Dick Broadwell;
George "Bitter Creek" Newcomb,
Bill Power
"Black-Faced"
Charlie Bryant,
and
Bill Doolin. These tough characters, along with
Bob,
Grat,
and
Emmett then robbed banks and trains throughout
Oklahoma
for the next 18 months. However, the Dalton
Gang came to an end in 1892, at Coffeyville, Kansas, when they
attempted a double bank robbery in
on October 5, 1892. Spotted
by locals, a shootout followed the attempted robbery which claimed the
lives of
Grat and Bob Dalton,
Dick Broadwell and
Bill Power;
as well as four Coffeyville residents.
Emmett Dalton, though seriously wounded, was the only the
only one to survive and wound up serving 14 years in prison.
Deputy
Marshal Heck Thomas remembered Bob Dalton as the most accurate shot
he had ever seen. He was buried at the
Coffeyville,
Kansas
Cemetery under a marker for himself, his brother
Grat, and
Bill Power.
Grattan "Grat” Dalton
(1865-1892)
- Also serving as a U.S. Deputy Marshal before he turned
outlaw,
Grattan Dalton was born in
1865 near
Lawrence,
Kansas,
one of fifteen children. The
family moved to
Indian Territory in 1882.
Grat took his brother,
Frank's job as
a
U.S. Deputy Marshal after
Frank was killed on November 27,1887.
The following year, he took a bullet in the left arm when he was trying to
serve an arrest warrant on an Indian outlaw. In August, 1889, he was working as a
Deputy Marshal for the
Muskogee court in
Indian Territory.
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