He was born Josiah Horner in Indiana in 1849, the son of a Confederate soldier, and by his mid-teens he was already shedding that identity for another. As a boy he ran away from home and attached himself to a Union officer’s unit, an early sign of an instinct that would define his life: Joe Horner always chose the winning side. After the war he hired on as a teamster, and rumor held that he killed his first man with a neck yoke, beating his boss to death in a quarrel. He was tried before a military tribunal and acquitted, though the story may owe more to legend than fact.
By the early 1870s Horner had drifted into Texas, where he worked cattle and built a small ranch in Jack County. He also built a reputation. He ran with a gang of young hell-raisers, stole horses from the Indians, and when his neighbors came up short, Horner always seemed to have cattle for sale. He was suspected of stealing a safe from the Jacksboro post office, and when a fellow gang member was shot dead by a scout named Henry Strong, Horner and his men began trying to assassinate Strong in return.
The attempts all failed, but Horner’s trajectory was set. On October 10, 1874, Horner got into a brawl with several Black soldiers from Fort Richardson in Jacksboro, and when a detachment arrived to arrest him, he refused to go. A full gun battle erupted in the street between Horner and the Buffalo Soldiers. He emptied his revolvers, grabbed his Winchester, and fought from horseback until his horse was shot out from under him.
A friend pulled him out of town as soldiers pursued, wounding the friend in the thigh. Horner escaped on his friend’s horse. One soldier was shot between the eyes, though accounts differ on whether he was even part of the fight. By then Horner was facing indictment for cattle theft and assault.
He was arrested, posted bond, and kept right on stealing cattle. When a bondsman withdrew his support, Horner was jailed in Graham, Texas. Four nights later, friends broke him out, cutting the telegraph lines as they rode away. Now fully committed to outlawry, he robbed a bank in Comanche in January 1876.
The posse that chased him lost the trail, but Henry Strong did not. He tracked Horner to San Antonio, where Horner was arrested alongside his brother. The brothers spent over a year in the old jailhouse on Military Plaza, a building with so many bats between its roof and ceiling that the place was called the Batcave. In March 1877 Horner was convicted of the bank robbery and sentenced to ten years of hard labor at Huntsville State Penitentiary.
Two weeks later he escaped, tunneling through the stone wall with three cellmates and leaving one of them behind. He held up a stagecoach sixteen days later, was recaptured that same evening, and had ten more years added to his sentence. He was delivered to Huntsville in May 1877, but he never intended to stay. Fifteen months later, on August 4, 1879, Joe Horner walked away from a work detail and simply vanished.
He left no trace in prison records. He was listed nowhere among the state’s escaped convicts. As far as Texas was concerned, Joe Horner had died on the day he disappeared. In his place rose Frank Canton.
He surfaced in Colorado in 1880, working as a cowboy, then drifted north into Wyoming, where the cattle business was booming. Canton understood that power belonged to the big ranchers, and he made it his business to attach himself to them. He befriended the wealthy cattle barons who ran the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, and in 1881 they hired him as a stock inspector. He was commissioned as a deputy sheriff, then elected sheriff of Johnson County in 1882.
As sheriff, Canton was relentless. He strengthened the county jail, purchased handcuffs and shackles, and installed steel cages, a knowing professional’s touch, since Canton had broken out of more jails than most men had seen. He sent sixteen men to prison in four years and hanged one murderer. He arrested a member of the James gang and the outlaw Teton Jackson, who wrote Canton from prison asking for twenty dollars to buy tobacco.
Canton sent it. He arrested two young Arapaho men for killing cattle, then worked to get them light sentences, and put the wife of one up in his own home as a guest. But public opinion in Johnson County was turning against the big ranchers, and Canton was known as their man. Juries stopped convicting the men he arrested.
When his second term ended, he went back to work for the association as a detective. The Great Blizzard of 1887 wiped out ninety percent of the open-range cattle, bankrupted the cattle barons, and the association cut Canton loose. For a few years he worked his own ranch, but the conflict between the big ranchers and the small homesteaders was coming to a head. In July 1889, two homesteaders named Jim Averell and Ella Watson were dragged from their home and hanged.
Ella, later slandered as a prostitute and rustler named Cattle Kate, was remembered by locals as a good woman who fed travelers and never stole a cow. The real issue was that their legally acquired land sat in the middle of a big rancher’s pasture. The lynching opened the Johnson County War. A young cowboy named Orley Jones left Buffalo, Wyoming, with a wagonload of lumber and was never seen alive again.
Days later, John Tisdell, another blacklisted cowboy and a former foreman on Teddy Roosevelt’s ranch, was shot dead on the road outside of town. Witnesses said the man with the pistol was Frank Canton. For good measure, whoever killed Tisdell also murdered his horses and his hound dog. Canton was arrested and released for insufficient evidence.
He sent his wife and daughters to Chicago, and when a second warrant was issued and a five-thousand-dollar bounty posted, Canton’s wealthy patrons posted thirty thousand dollars in bond, put up by twenty-one members of the association. He returned to Wyoming in the spring of 1892, and this time he brought an army. The association recruited roughly twenty hired gunmen from Texas, former federal officers and men with dangerous reputations. Combined with ranchers and old detectives, the force numbered about fifty-two.
They loaded onto a private train in Cheyenne, cut the telegraph lines into Buffalo, and rode out with a kill list of the homesteaders and suspected rustlers they intended to eliminate. Their first target was a cabin on the KC Ranch where Nate Champion and Nick Ray were holed up. The invaders surrounded the cabin and opened fire. Ray was shot as he tried to reenter the door.
Champion held out for hours, writing an account of the siege in a notebook as bullets tore through the walls. When the invaders set the cabin on fire, Champion burst out with his Winchester, ran across the meadow, and was cut down by a hail of bullets. The invaders pinned a note to his body that read: Cattle thieves beware. Then they marched on Buffalo, but the town was ready.
Armed citizens had rallied, and when the invaders fell back to the TA Ranch, they found themselves besieged by nearly two hundred furious locals. The army arrived and took the invaders into protective custody. None of them were ever convicted. Frank Canton’s murder charge was quietly dropped when the key witness against him left the county.
Decades later, that witness would claim that the man who actually killed John Tisdell was the notorious assassin Tom Horn. Canton left Wyoming and landed in Oklahoma, where an old friend from his outlaw days, Frank Lake, was the new sheriff of Pawnee County. Canton became undersheriff and a deputy U. S.
marshal, chasing genuine outlaws in Indian Territory. He tracked down the Dunn brothers, tangled with the Dalton gang’s remnants, and shot a man in the head during an arrest. He finally managed to secure a full pardon from the governor of Texas by revealing his true identity and presenting himself as a reformed man. In 1897, with the Alaska Gold Rush underway, Canton went north as a deputy U.
S. marshal. He wintered in a cabin on the Yukon, nearly froze, and once arrested a gang of thieves by boarding their stolen steamboat alone and announcing that he intended to kill all three of them. But his past in Oklahoma caught up with him; he was fired from the marshal service over padded expense accounts.
He returned to Wyoming in 1899 and nearly walked into an ambush, a twelve-year-old boy waiting with a revolver to avenge his father’s murder. Canton slipped into town unseen and avoided the confrontation. He spent his final years drifting between law enforcement and political appointments. When Oklahoma became a state in 1907, he used his connections to become adjutant general of the state, commanding the National Guard despite never having served a day in the military.
He used that authority to enforce blue laws, break up prize fights, and suppress unsanctioned horse races. In 1916, the National Defense Act made his commission obsolete, and he was promoted to major general and pushed into retirement. Canton spent his last years writing his memoirs, which were published after his death. The book revealed nothing about Joe Horner.
But a copy sitting in the public library in Buffalo, Wyoming, carried the penciled verdict of an anonymous reader: liar, thief, murderer. This book is a pack of lies. I hope very few people ever read it. Frank Canton died on September 27, 1927, and was buried with full military honors.
He had lived two lives, each built on the other’s wreckage, and he never stopped running from the man he used to be.