HISTORY MINUTE

\\he 1880s and 1890s saw the rise of some of the most notorious criminals in American History, mostly riding the dusty trails of the West. One of the most infamous was the Dalton Gang, made up of outlaws from Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. The Dalton Gang, a notorious group made up of a group of Kansas brothers and an Arkansas drifter, terrorized the frontier with a string of murders and robberies stretching across the Lower Great Plains.

The Dalton Gang was led by three brothers from Kansas. Their parents, Lewis Dalton and Adeline Younger, aunt to the outlaws Cole and Jim Younger, had fifteen children together. They settled in Coffeyville in southeastern Kansas and were otherwise honest citizens. Ironically, the eldest Dalton brother, Frank Dalton, had been a respected Deputy U. S. Marshal before his own death in the line of duty in 1887. Three brothers, Grat, Emmett, and Bob had worked with posses their brother had organized and briefly continued to work as deputies afterward.

Along the way, they turned away from the law and into a whirlwind of crime and destruction. By 1891, the three had formed the Dalton Gang, bringing in a number of characters from across Oklahoma. One, Bill Doolin, was born in rural Johnson County in Western Arkansas in 1858, the son of destitute sharecroppers. He moved to what was at that time the Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma) in 1881 as a ranch hand, but he drifted for several years afterward and had a number of brushes with the law.

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