STILL WANTED!
Fort Worth, Texas, boasts a historic mine laden with gold—not the yellow stuff of legend but a collection of genuine wanted posters, handbills and related correspondence dating from 1892 to 1908. They’d been collecting dust in the Fort Worth Police Department archives when Deputy Chief Joe Galloway set them aside for safekeeping. When he retired from the force in 1965 to take a job as law enforcement coordinator at Tarrant County College, he brought the collection with him and donated them for preservation. The period posters now reside in the college’s Heritage Room.
Law enforcement agencies put the word out on wanted men using traditional posters and handbills, newspaper releases and personal correspondence. Among the notable items in the Tarrant County College collection are correspondence from the Pinkerton National Detective Agency and the Los Angeles police chief to the Fort Worth chief (both dated 1902). Noted Dallas County Sheriff Ben Cabell added a personal note to one 1894 handbill: “Tell [Fort Worth Police Chief] Jim Maddox to ring me up. I want to talk to him.” Another 1894 notice, from Travis County Sheriff Robert E. White, gets right to the point: “Broke my jail! 18 men. Don’t care much for [recapturing] any of these men except 2.” Posted rewards range from $10 to $4,000 for such crimes as “absconding” and “false pretenses” to murder and safecracking.
One particularly well preserved handbill sought the arrest of James Redmond, among the more elusive of those long-ago fugitives. On the night of Dec. 8, 1897, he and cohort John F. “Jack” Kennedy tried to rob Miss Emma Schumacher’s grocery store in Kansas City, Mo. Though Kennedy, a onetime engineer,
