Wanted : Dead or Alive

[James Bearde]

When the bounty hunters of the west went after the fugitives whose vital info and cash rewards that were as posted, Were the Stamps on these wanted posters "Wanted : Dead or Alive" generally used for premoting the capture and dispatching of the general fugitive population or was it primarily used mostly for extreme cases such as those regarding the likes of Billy the Kid, John W. Hardin, Frank & Jesse James, Clay Allison ETC?
Or was it rarely stamped on these wanted posters at all?...

[Janet Erwin]

I don't know about the others you named, but there was only one wanted poster ever for the "real" Billy the Kid, issued by NM Territorial governor Lew Wallace in late 1880 (I think it was):

BILLY THE KID
$500 Reward
I will pay $500 to any person or persons
who will capture William Bonny (sic),
alias The Kid, and deliver him to any
sheriff of New Mexico. Satisfactory proofs
of identity will be required.

Lew. Wallace
Governor of New Mexico

*********

There are some who think the omission of "Dead or Alive" on this poster was an indication of Wallace's continued admiration and sympathy for the Kid, and/or his acknowledgment that Bonney was really a pretty minor outlaw and not even close to being the "Bandit King"/ruthless killer Bonney's powerful enemies had painted him as being.

Others claim that's complete nonsense and that few wanted posters anywhere specified that the subject was wanted "Dead or Alive."

I know Crittenden offered $5,000 for Jesse James, but I don't remember if he specified "dead or alive" as well.

Great topic, James Bearde. I look forward to reading the responses!

[Wolfgang]

I've seen on good authority ( if ya call "True West Magazine" a good authority? ) that there was never a wanted "poster" for Billy the Kid. There was a newspaper advertizement. And that text had been used repeatedly for the making of "posters" that never actually existed.

[Janet Erwin]

Nope, there was a poster. Most of them apparently didn't get distributed, and a whole cache of them was found fairly recently in Santa Fe. I think they'd been printed up by the Santa Fe New Mexican, which may be where you all got the idea it was a newspaper ad instead of a poster.

There was one on display at the Dreamscape Desperado exhibit at the Albuquerque Museum in the summer of 2007, the others presumably having been snapped up by collectors.

And Augustus is right about the "mugshots," because as far as I know the technology for reproducing photographs didn't exist in the 1870s/1880s.

[Janet Erwin]

The poster looked just like the ad, IIRC, so apparently Wallace placed a notice in the newspaper(s) and had posters printed up as well, although as I said earlier, most of them weren't distributed and a box or boxes of them were found fairly recently, in an attic or storage area over (what had been) a print shop in Santa Fe. (I'm operating strictly on memory here, but I recall quite clearly the poster on display in the Dreamscape Desperado exhibit, and I'm assuming that's where I saw the above information as well.)

Speaking of DD, I got out that issue ofTrue West (May 2007) and as part of the section entitled The Many Faces of Billy the Kid, in a couple of paragraph on the "Woodcut Kid" the following information appears:

Publishers did not have the technology to print actual photographs so engravings were printed instead.

so I'm wondering--if Jeff's correct and TW is (gasp!) not, maybe it was simply quicker and cheaper to have an engraver do a rendering of a given photograph, rather than go through the trouble and expense of reproducing the photo itself? Seems counterintuitive to me, but I only know what I read (or think I've read ;-)

[Gay Mathis]

Pictorial Newspapers--(Link)

Excerpt:

The first true news pictorial weekly newspapers did not appear in America until 1851. They were made possible by rapid advances in news gathering which resulted in an unprecedented demand for "the latest". The only method of illustration available at this time was woodcut engraving, that is, blocks of wood hand-engraved and then made into stereotype plates to be used in the giant rotary presses also newly emerged at this time. Although a practical means for reproducing photographs in newspapers would not exist until the late 1890;s, many of the illustrations are based on daguerreotype, tintypes, and later albumen prints, interpreted by artisans who modeled their woodblocks on these originals.