Outlaw Tales of Kansas by Sarah Smarsh

Author:Sarah Smarsh
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781461746164
Publisher: TwoDot

Dirty Dave Rudabaugh

Scent of an Outlaw, 1876

In a time when baths were few and far between—and a place where personal hygiene was considerably compromised—and among men whose teeth were as yellow as the sun, Dave Rudabaugh still managed to earn a reputation for being dirty. His grimy, disheveled appearance—and signature odor—somehow offended even gunslingers of the West in the late 1800s.

“Dirty Dave” Rudabaugh was born in Fulton County, Illinois, in 1854. His father died in the Civil War when Rudabaugh was a child, and the young boy and his destitute family bounced around between Illinois and Ohio. They finally settled in Eureka, Kansas, where Rudabaugh spent his adolescence before leaving home in his teens in the early 1870s.

As so many would-be outlaws were wont to do, Rudabaugh spent his younger years drifting from job to job, tiring quickly of positions as a bartender, messenger, cowboy, and ranch manager. It’s not as though there wasn’t excitement in these lines of work. Bartenders saw the wild nights of the frontier’s saloons; messengers needed vigilance against bandits and Indians during their travels; cowboys enjoyed a rugged freedom and plenty of whiskey. While working for the well-respected Charlie Rath moving buffalo hides from bustling Dodge City to Adobe Walls, a Texas trading outpost, Rudabaugh barely missed a bloody attack by Kiowa, Comanche, and Arapaho Indians.

Indeed, there was plenty of excitement to be found in respectable work. But Rudabaugh wasn’t long in these sorts of jobs, perhaps because the money was too slow, or perhaps because his fellow workers couldn’t tolerate his stench. By the early 1870s, when he was still a teenager, Dirty Dave Rudabaugh had found his true calling: outlaw.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.