Friday, August 7, 2009

Real Public Enemies-- Part 1

The June 28th Chicago Tribune's "Ten Things You Might Not Know" column was about Desperadoes in honor of the release of the movie Johnny Depp. Again, Mark Jacob does a great job compiling a list of interesting facts and pictures.

Search Chicago Tribune 10 Things You Might Not Know for more of his excellent columns. This would be a good way to approach history in schools.


1. A Wyoming bad-guy was known as "Big Nose George" Parrot who tried to derail a payroll train by removing the spikes on the rails. He and an accomplice killed two members of a posse that went after him. Captured and hanged in 1881, a local physician skinned his body, tanned it, and made it into a pair of shoes.


2. The famous photo of William Bonney, Billy the Kid, shows him holding a Winchester carbine in his right hand and a pistol holstered on his left hip, leading folks to deduce he was left-handed. But the photo is a tintype, which means the photo reversed. So Billy used his right hand to shoot the pistol.


3. The lady in red, Ana Sage, who helped the FBI ambush John Dillinger outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago, wasn't wearing red. She had on an orange skirt that looked red under the marquee lights.


4. The movie "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" had them dying in 1908 in Bolivia. But, it is not certain that Butch met his end there. His sister said he visited her in 1922, and others suspect he was known as William Phillips and died in Spokane, Washington, in the 1930s.

More Bad Guys to Come. -- Da Bad Coot

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