Tascosa: Its Life and Gaudy Times

As well as being the center of ranching activity in the Panhandle, Tascosa also became the last best hiding place in Texas for killers on the run, horse thieves, tinhorn gamblers, hair-trigger shootists or anyone else with a past he wanted to get away from. Billy the Kid, Poker Tom Emory, Bill Gatlin, Jim Kenedy, and Louis The Animal Bousman were just a few of the outlaws and desperadoes who vied for dominance with Cape Willingham, Cap Arrington, Jim East, and other lawmen in an ongoing war that made sudden death a routine occurrence on the town’s dusty street. A lot of bad men made fortunes and a lot of good men lost them as Tascosa went from boom to bust, from frontier Babylon to forgotten ghost town, in just a few short gaudy decades. Bypassed by the railroad, its body fenced in and its heart torn out, the community dried up and blew away. Today, Tascosa is a ghost town. Gone, but not forgotten: in Tascosa Frederick Nolan has dug up the rip-roaring history of one of the most violent outlaw towns of the Old West.