William James “Uncle Jimmy” Cannon always wanted to be a hero, and in his travels across the West he represented himself as an Alamo survivor, a decorated Mexican War veteran and an indispensable frontier scout. But his headline-grabbing fantasy life will forever be overshadowed by the night in 1891 he led an all-too-real lynch mob in Omaha, Neb.
The and related Cannon’s role in the gruesome death of George Smith on
