DEADLY HORSEPLAY IN THE DAKOTAS
Horse theft in the Old West often inconvenienced a victim far more than the present-day crime of car theft, as much of the region remained unsettled, and great distances separated population centers. A man without a horse might face a slow death, especially if caught out in arid country or the dead of winter. The consequences for a horse thief were also far more dire. While car theft might land one in jail today, getting caught with a stolen horse on the frontier could prove fatal.
Although popular Western films and TV shows tend to play up cattle rustling as the worst of all frontier crimes, real Westerners considered horse theft a far more grievous offense. It was largely a matter of geography. By the mid-19th century laws back in the crowded Eastern cities tended to treat horse theft as a simple misdemeanor, punishable by a fine. Western communities deemed it a capital offense, often meted out on an extralegal basis—usually, though not always, at the end of a rope.
in the sparsely populated expanses of the American West. Dakota Territory is a textbook case. By the mid-1870s crime was on the rise in that remote region. Things got so bad that in April 1877 territorial Supreme Court Chief Justice Peter C. Shannon—the man who three months earlier had sentenced Wild Bill Hickok’s killer, Jack McCall, to hang—had his own horse stolen from a stable in Yankton, the capital city. The judge advertised for its return, but whether it was recovered is unknown. The thief, Frank McMahon, was captured that fall, convicted and sent to prison. Two years later territorial Governor William Alanson Howard addressed a joint session of the Legislature,
