Northwest Collector

Collecting the Old West

Hollywood and the thing with . . .

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The original photographic wanted poster

Before there were wanted posters in the Old West—those standard props in Hollywood Westerns, featuring mug shots of glowering, greasy-haired murderers and train robbers, bushwhackers and cattle rustlers, card cheats, horse thieves, and all manner of other evildoers—there were wanted posters offering rewards for information leading to the arrest of the conspirators in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865.

A wanted poster for the Lincoln assassination conspirators. Note that actual photos were applied. Other wanted posters for the collaborators in the plot lacked the photos. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

I’ve seen these broadsides with and without photographs. In America, at least, the version with photos is believed to be the first to feature real images of wanted men. Small surprise that the newest technology would be employed: it was in the service of a nationwide manhunt for the murderers of the president, after all. (I’ve seen an earlier poster from England with a skillful engraving of a fugitive thief, which was no doubt rare and would have been costly, but it happened that the crook ripped off the sister of the engraver, so he volunteered his artistic talents to the pursuit.) However, the photographs are not printed on the paper but are albumin prints affixed to the poster, of which a very limited number of copies were made: the technology to print photos on paper for wider circulation (as in books and newspapers) had not yet been invented.

Wanted in the West

The great Marshall Trimball, official historian of the state of Arizona, True West magazine columnist, prolific author, and an authority on the Old West whom I’ve consulted in the past, was asked by a True West reader when photos were first used on wanted posters.

“In the classic era of the Old West—1870s and 1880s—most reward posters were just handbills or postcards sent to law enforcement officials with printed descriptions of the wanted men. No photos . . . ,” Trimble replied.

“Authorities rarely placed wanted posters in public places. A reward or wanted notice would occasionally be printed in a newspaper, but for the most part, they were not intended for general consumption.”

—Marshall Trimball

A postcard from Iowa in 1882 offering $100 for the arrest of a horse thief. Here, too, an albumin photo was pasted on. Wanted postcards were an easy way for peace officers to get the word out on wanted men (and the occasional woman). Author’s collection.
A great example of a pre-photographic handbill from San Francisco in early 1897, advertising a $500 reward for a murderer. Image courtesy of Gene W. Baade Books on the West, www.booksonthewest.com.

He pointed out that it wasn’t until the late 1890s or early 1900s that entirely printed handbills and wanted posters featuring images of outlaws began to appear as printing technology evolved: “For example, the Pinkertons put out several posters of the members of the Wild Bunch, complete with pictures.”

Prior to that, “some lawmen carried photos made of criminals when they were in prison,” Trimball observed. “The backs of these mug shots featured descriptions that included height, weight, hair and eye color, scars and identifying marks. But these were put together by hand, and the photos were originals, not prints. I’ve seen these saddlebag circulars, and they are amazing. You can see the seeds of the later wanted posters that we think of when we watch Western movies.”1

I’ve seen the Wild Bunch posters that Trimble mentioned, issued by the Pinkerton National Detective Agency: they are double-sided “circulars” (the Pinkerton agency’s own term) loaded with information on Butch Cassidy, Harry Longbaugh (the Sundance Kid), and other members of the gang, and they all seem to date from 1904—relatively late. Also, they don’t look like the kind of things that would have been put up on a wall or lamppost, and in fact Trimble notes: “Authorities rarely placed wanted posters in public places. A reward or wanted notice would occasionally be printed in a newspaper, but for the most part, they were not intended for general consumption.”2

So that’s two myths exploded: wanted posters in the Old West weren’t put up on Main Street in Big Bug, Arizona Territory (which used to be an actual place but is now a ghost town), and they didn’t feature the likenesses of bad guys, either drawn or photographed—at any rate, not prior to the turn of the twentieth century.

Kirk Douglas as Howard Nightingale, a Texas marshal and aspiring U.S. senator, in the 1975 film Posse, with a wanted poster for train robber Jack Strawhorn (Bruce Dern). The press kit indicates the story takes place in the 1890s. The format of the poster may be a little off, but at least it’s close to the time when a poster with a printed mug shot might have been produced. Photo from the Douglas Foundation Archive. Used with their kind permission.

Early posters with printed photos

Since the Butch Cassidy/Sundance Kid/Wild Bunch posters of 1904 are often cited as among the earliest wanted posters with printed-on photos, I started looking for earlier ones from west of the Mississippi. The oldest I’ve found so far dates to 1900, but I’m certain that there are earlier ones. Some examples follow. They are often found on book dealers’ websites and on eBay, as are earlier ones with applied photos. The ones on this page that are from booksellers were still available at the time of this writing.

Not exactly exactly a wanted poster but an early image nonetheless, of a man missing from San Francisco in 1900. Author’s collection.
A 1901 poster from Chicago for a guy who embezzled from American Express. Image courtesy of David Hamilton Americana Books, www.americanabookstore.com.

Notes

  1. Marshal Trimball, “When Were Photos First Put on Wanted Posters?,” True West, June 10, 2013, accessed August 2, 2025, https://truewestmagazine.com/article/when-were-photos-first-put-on-wanted-posters/.
  2. Trimball, “When Were Photos First Put on Wanted Posters?”

COLLECT THIS EXPERIENCE! While researching the above story, I came across a great website called I Review Westerns. These are thoughtful, intelligent, earthy, no-holds-barred assessments of Westerns—films and literary works—by someone who is clearly devoted to the genre. You may not agree with all the reviews, but they are an awful lot of fun to read. I encourage you to visit IReviewWesterns.com.

James Mooney and Temple Lea Houston

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This marks the start of a new feature on Northwest Collector: cool finds that other collectors missed.

I love getting interesting stuff cheap—especially when there are no competing bids at auction. It means I spotted something others didn’t. How much fun is that?

My fellow Old West collectors may appreciate this recent purchase. . .

Envelope addressed to James Mooney

James Mooney (1861–1921) was a self-taught ethnographer and authority on the American Indian; he wrote important works on the Cherokee, Kiowa, and Cheyenne. In the 1880s he joined the Bureau of Ethnology (which would be absorbed by the Smithsonian) and investigated the Wounded Knee “Outbreak of 1890” at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. He published his research on the Ghost Dance (U.S. Army suppression of which led to the assassination of Sitting Bull, conflict with the Lakota, and the subsequent massacre) in bureau’s 14th annual report in 1896 (a popular issue and somewhat pricy volume, presumably in large part because of extensive Mooney article, but you can download a pdf from the Smithsonian website). Mooney was also an accomplished photographer, and original prints of his Indian images are rare and expensive. Almost all of his letters seem to be at the Smithsonian and therefore are virtually unobtainable.

James Mooney. Image courtesy of the Smithsonian.

No surprise, then, that this cover, sent in 1904, contained no letter, but it’s still an item with a story or two. 

For one thing, it’s written to Mooney in Mount Scott, Oklahoma (i.e., Oklahoma Territory, which, with Indian Territory, would become the state of Oklahoma in 1907). Mount Scott, named for General Winfield Scott, is a peak in the Wichita range and located in the what was then the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache reservation. Mooney was obviously doing fieldwork.

There are also a few barely legible notations, one of which says “Also has Lance Heads, Hair Plates . . . Medicine Masks . . .” Apparently the writer had artifacts to show Mooney or sell to him.

So who was the writer? Here’s where it gets really interesting.

The return address is for Appelget & Houston, Attorneys at Law, of Woodward, Oklahoma, I was unable to find out much about law office partner Anthony Appelget apart from the fact that he and his family arrived in Woodward from Sheridan, Wyoming, in 1900.

Houston is another story. It turns out that the other partner in the firm was Temple Lea Houston (1860–1905), youngest child of Texas legend Sam Houston. A born adventurer with an intellectual bent and a bit of an iconoclast with an affinity for the Indians, Temple Lea Houston served in the Texas senate from 1885 to 1889. According to Texas Tech University archivist Hugh Allen Anderson, “although flamboyant and sometimes eccentric in dress and appearance, Houston won a reputation as a brilliant trial lawyer and a gifted speaker, whose oratory was laced with allusions to the Bible and classical literature. He was a dead shot and often carried a pearl-handled pistol . . .”1 On one notable occasion, writes True West magazine features editor Mark Boardman, Houston “insulted opposing counsel Ed Jennings during an 1895 trial in Woodward . . . Jennings responded in kind. And then the fight moved to a different kind of bar.” At Jack Garvey’s saloon, the animosity boiled over. Ed Jennings and his brother John got into a shoot-out with Houston. Ed was killed. John was hit but survived.

Temple Lea Houston. Image number 1980_088_001_Temple_Houston from the Jake Johnson Collection, courtesy of Texas State Library and Archives Commission.

“John Jennings and his other brothers Al and Frank then took the outlaw trail in a six month misadventure,” Boardman adds, concluding: “Bad lawyers. Bad gunfighters. Bad criminals.”2

“Houston was acquitted after acting as his own counsel and pleading self-defense. Twenty witnesses testified that Ed Jennings had drawn first,” writes “hometown” on the website Hometown by Handlebar, in an article that features the best “primary source” documents on Temple Houston that I’ve seen online.3

But the bad blood between Houston and the Jenning family didn’t end there. The following year Ed Jennings’s father, a judge, ran into Temple Houston’s young son on the street when the boy was returning home from school. The judge spat in the younger Houston’s face in response to something the kid said. “[Temple] Houston killed father Judge Jennings in the same saloon where Houston had killed son Ed Jennings . . .” notes hometown. “In 1897 ‘the son of Sam Houston’ pleaded guilty and was fined $300 for killing Judge Jennings in 1896.”4

“Although flamboyant and sometimes eccentric in dress and appearance, Houston won a reputation as a brilliant trial lawyer and a gifted speaker, whose oratory was laced with allusions to the Bible and classical literature. He was a dead shot and often carried a pearl-handled pistol . . .”

Badassness aside, Houston was an inspired courtroom performer and legal advocate. In 1899, Woodward prostitute Minnie Stacey was put on trial for, um, prostitution, but lacked legal representation; the judge asked Houston to take on the case. “He had all of ten minutes to prepare a defense,” writes John Troesser of TexasEscapes.com, a really excellent online magazine devoted to the history of the Lone Star State. “Since everyone in town knew her—or perhaps we should say everyone in town was aware of her reputation—Temple knew that a defense was hopeless. So he attacked men in general for creating women like her and was so forceful in his condemnation that there wasn’t a dry eye in the courtroom—excepting the lawyers.”5

Houston’s defense of Stacey is now known as the “Soiled Dove Plea” or “Plea for a Fallen Woman.”

Obviously, Houston—the subject of the 1980 biography Temple Houston: Lawyer with a Gun by Glen Shirley (University of Oklahoma Press)—was the kind of character that fascinates students of the Old West like your humble correspondent.

Which adds that more spice to this cover: I was able to find a letter by Temple Houston online (priced at $1,500) and—cowabunga!—the handwriting matched perfectly. Purchase price: $19.99 plus tax and shipping. Satisfaction value: priceless.

Notes

1. Hugh Allen Anderson, “Temple Lea Houston: A Legacy of Law and Oratory in Texas,” Texas State Historical Association, 1952, updated October 26, 2019, accessed July 13, 2025, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/houston-temple-lea.

2. Mark Boardman, “Temple Houston,” True West, June 18, 2015, accessed July 13, 2025, https://truewestmagazine.com/article/temple-houston/.

3. hometown, “Temple Houston: Standing in the Shadow of Sam,” Hometown by Handlebar, August 15, 2019, accessed July 16, 2025, https://hometownbyhandlebar.com/p-7219/.

4. hometown, “Temple Houston.”

5. John Troesser, “Temple Lea Houston: Son of Sam,” TexasEscapes.com, October 2002, accessed July 14, 2025, http://www.texasescapes.com/TexasPersonalities/TempleLeaHouston/TempleLeaHouston.htm#google_vignette.