Frontier Justice

Frontier Justice. . Texas has become synonymous with the Wild West. From its earliest days, outlaws and thieves were as much a part of Texas legend and folklore as longhorns and cattle drives. Famous outlaws from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to Jesse James and Sam Bass made frequent stops in the small towns and communities of the Texas frontier., John Alison Goldsmith became such an outlaw. In the 1870s a teenaged Goldsmith arrived in Texas, along with his parents and thirteen siblings. Living was hard on the frontier and Goldsmith soon took up the outlaw life. , After one arrest, Goldsmith escaped from the Tarrant County jail, seriously wounding a jailer. On November 24, 1877, his luck ran out and he was shot during another escape attempt after an arrest on suspicion of horse theft. He was 22 years old. , Goldsmith was buried on land that belonged to his sister Sarah Goldsmith and her husband Thomas Moore Riley. While the family erected a proper headstone for him, only the sandstone base remains to mark his grave.