Most Notorious! A True Crime History Podcast · Blue Ewe Media

429: The Last Outlaws of the Old West w/ Tom Clavin

·1 hr 2 min·4 clips

Coffeyville turned into an armed town when hardware stores handed out guns to residents.

1. Most Notorious! A True Crime History Podcast focuses on Tom Clavin’s books The Last Outlaws and Bandit Heaven, both centered on the late American West. 2. Eric Rivenis hosts Tom Clavin, a prolific author who previously appeared to discuss the Earp brothers, Tombstone, White Earp, and Bat Masterson. 3. The episode asks how the Dalton gang, Butch Cassidy, Sundance Kid, and the Hole in the Wall network fit into the last years of outlaw life in the West. 4. Clavin says his interest in the West came from 1960s films and TV shows such as Bonanza, Rawhide, F Troop, Big Valley, and Wild West feature films. 5. He describes seeing Lonely Are the Brave, Ride the High Country, The Wild Bunch, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as a child. 6. He says he once thought Western movies were true, and that they played like “a newsreel” to him. 7. Clavin says writing Dodge City led to his first major Western bestseller and then to Wild Bill after lunch with his editor and agent. 8. He frames The Last Outlaws around the Dalton brothers, the Doolin-Dalton gang, and the Coffeyville, Kansas raid of October 1892. 9. He says the Dalton brothers and two associates tried to rob two banks at the same time in Coffeyville in broad daylight. 10. He connects that raid to Emmett Dalton surviving after being shot 23 times and to the later Doolin-Dalton gang. 11. Clavin says the Daltons started on the law-and-order side through an older brother who had been a deputy marshal. 12. He notes that Bob Dalton became the “brains of the operation,” while Grat and the others were less capable. 13. He says the brothers grew up poor near Coffeyville and had trouble with jobs as farmers, horse wranglers, and lawmen. 14. Clavin says excitement and money mattered, and he compares bank robbery proceeds to “ransom notes” as a lucrative criminal model. 15. He says Coffeyville’s gun restrictions backfired when residents bought rifles and ammunition from hardware stores during the raid. 16. He also links the Daltons to older outlaw families, the James gang, and the Northfield, Minnesota raid as a precedent. 17. The tone is conversational and explanatory, with Clavin often answering from memory and then correcting himself with research details. 18. The format is a long interview with digressions into films, family histories, geography, and the changing technology of phones and telegraphs. 19. Listeners who like Old West outlaw history and film comparisons should fit this episode. 20. Listeners wanting a tight, fast-moving crime narrative may skip the detours.

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