FROM EMIGRANT TO EX-CON
The annals of the Wild West are filled with characters who led lives of great drama on the frontier but are long forgotten. Among them is Paxton Jacoby, an emigrant wagon train driver, prospector, gambler and lawman from the 1850s through the ’90s. He was also a gunfighter who left a bloody trail in California and Nevada. His story has never been told.
Paxton King Jacoby was born in Pennsylvania on May 15, 1836. In the 1840s his father moved his wife and their four children to Stark County, Ohio. There, on Feb. 28, 1857, Paxton’s younger sister, Rebecca, 18, married William B. Duck, a 23-year-old riverboatman. Duck had a hankering to move West, and Rebecca and Paxton were all for it, so they organized a small party of emigrants with several wagons and a hundred head of cattle. Within weeks of William and Rebecca’s wedding the party started for California, likely setting out by boat down the Ohio River. After crossing the Mississippi, they drove their wagons west through Arkansas.
In April 1857 in the Ozark Mountains they fell in with a westbound wagon train led by John Twitty “Jack” Baker. Baker’s train then joined another led by Alexander Fancher, and other families soon joined what became known as the Baker-Fancher party. As Jacoby later recounted for a reporter, “It was the richest and best-equipped train that ever set off across the continent, numbering about 140 souls—men, women and children—with 900 head of cattle in a herd and 100 working oxen drawing the 16 wagons.” Some of the settlers were drawn by the promise of gold, while others planned to establish cattle ranches in California.
They continued west across the Plains, following the Arkansas River to Pikes Peak in what would become Colorado. Jacoby, Duck and a handful of other party members were Northerners who opposed slavery, while
