My interest in historical crime was inspired by my family history, as many of my ancestors, who were all poor, broke the law. However, there were a couple of individuals in my family tree who were on the right side of the justice system, one of whom emigrated to the American West where he took up the office of sheriff in the 1870s. His fight against crime in a lawless railroad town included a link with Buffalo Bill. One of the earliest families to settle in Laramie, Wyoming, the Nottages left the poverty-stricken landscape of rural England to pursue their American dream. Sheriff Nottage’s remarkable story begins in a Hertfordshire village and ends in a pioneering adventure across the US.

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A rural upbringing

Daniel Nottage was born in 1838, in the village of Barkway, Hertfordshire. He was the third child of Henry and Ann Nottage (my 3 x great-grandparents) and the older brother of my great-great-grandfather, Jordan (who incidentally became a police constable in the Met). The Nottages had eight children in total; six sons and two daughters. Henry was a shepherd and Ann, a charwoman. Both were illiterate and survived on the breadline. The family was plunged even further into precarity in 1852, when Henry died of TB, aged just 38. At the time, Daniel was 12 years old and working as an agricultural labourer, with three of his brothers. By the end of the decade, the Nottage family had started to fragment, and Daniel moved to Doncaster, where he found work as a railway guard. He married Christiana Armfield in 1858 but sadly she died also of TB, two years later.

On 16 May 1861, Daniel set out from Liverpool for New York. He travelled alone, crossing the Atlantic, at the age of 23. After settling initially in Hillsdale, Michigan, he was joined by brothers David and Henry, two years later. Their widowed mother, Ann, and their youngest brother William arrived in 1865. (The others, including my 2 x great-grandfather stayed in England). By this time, Daniel had married Sarah Crisp, who was also from England. They stayed in Michigan for the birth of their two oldest children, and then moved to Nebraska, where they began farming. By the time their third child was born, in October 1871, the couple had settled in Laramie, a new town on the Union Pacific Railroad and at the frontier of the ‘Wild West’.

Arrival in the Wild West

Located on the Laramie River, in southeastern Wyoming, and near to the Overland Stage Line route, the town was settled in the late-1860s, as the transcontinental railroad extended from Nebraska out into the western plains. Initially, it was a ‘tent city’ with temporary buildings, including a saloon, a store and a railroad depot, including a restaurant and a hotel. The line opened in 1868, and the first passengers arrived soon after. By the time Dan Nottage came to Laramie in 1871, there were more permanent stores, houses, churches and a school, for the 800 residents.

However, the early years were marred by lawlessness and the first mayor had resigned after six weeks due to the terrorising of the local community by gunman ‘Big’ Steve Long, and his half-brothers, Con and Ace Moyer, who jointly owned a saloon. They harassed newly-arrived settlers, forcing them at gunpoint to hand over their property deeds. By the end of 1868, the trio had killed 13 men. Their reign of terror came to an end when the first Albany County sheriff, Nathaniel Kimball Boswell, arrested them and they were hanged for their murderous actions. Order was restored to the town but, in 1870, there were still many desperadoes in and around Laramie, with frequent robberies, assaults and gun battles.

In 1877, Dan Nottage was elected sheriff of Albany County. He moved into the newly-fitted sheriff’s office in the county courtroom in Laramie, which was described in the local press as ‘comfortable and tasteful’. During his year in office, his cases included the arrest of a saddle thief, the capture of horse rustlers, as well as travelling to other towns. On one occasion, he went to Evanston, near the Utah border, to bring a jewel thief back to Laramie for justice. Sheriff Nottage was also called to a ranch near Fort McKinney in north-eastern Wyoming, to investigate an attempted murder, after one of the ranch-hands was shot by another in a fight.

On another occasion, Dan arrested a man for the robbery of a Laramie restaurant. Whilst the suspect, who was named Harris, was in jail, he attempted to escape by getting hold of a knife, which he used to loosen the rivets on his shackles. He then replaced them with wooden pegs so that when an opportunity arose, he could slip out of them and make for the hills. However, Sheriff Nottage wasn’t fooled and he caught onto Harris’s ruse and re-secured him. Later that month, Harris got into a fight at the jailhouse, with another prisoner, which resulted in his being stabbed three times with an old pair of shears.

A tricky arrest

The highlight of Sheriff Nottage’s short stint of law enforcement was the capture of notorious horse thief and bandit, Bill Bevins. In 1869, Bevins had stolen some livestock from Fort Lyon in Colorado, and Civil War veteran General Carr had ordered government scout, pony express rider and buffalo hunter, William F. Cody, aka ‘Buffalo Bill’, to bring him to justice. Buffalo Bill and his posse tracked Bevins to Denver, where they captured him at his camp. On the way back to Colorado, Bevins escaped and, after an exciting 18-mile chase through the snow, Cody recaptured the felon, who had run all the way barefoot. He eventually turned him over to the authorities, but he escaped again. Bill Bevins roamed throughout the Laramie Plains for several years until the law caught up with him again. Another warrant for his arrest was issued in Wyoming after he attacked a rancher during a robbery in 1871 – fortunately, the rancher’s wife had hit him with a stick, which had saved her husband’s life.

However, Bevins was now on the run once again and was captured in the Black Hills, between Cheyenne and Deadwood, where he had committed a series of stagecoach robberies, in which a man had been killed. In July 1877, Sheriff Nottage received a telegraph instructing him to travel to Sweetwater County to escort Bevins back to Laramie for trial. It was a daunting task, given Bevins’ record for absconding, but Dan rose to the challenge and brought the violent thief safely back to jail. Bill Bevins, aged 39, who some believe to have been the husband of Calamity Jane, was sentenced to eight years, of which he served five. Buffalo Bill immortalised the infamous bandit’s adventures in his memoirs.

After he left office, Dan Nottage gained employment as an inspector at the rolling mill which, built in 1875, manufactured new railroad rails and machine parts. He and his wife, and their five children, lived on a cattle ranch, near his mother and two of his brothers and their families. In the mid-1880s, Dan left the rolling mill and finally returned to the railways, serving as a senior conductor on the St Louis Southwestern Railroad, known as the Cotton Belt Route. He moved to Arkansas with his family in 1892, then to Texas, and finally to Louisiana, where he died in 1914, over 50 years after he had left his homeland for a new life.

Dan’s brother, Henry, also settled in Laramie, where he was the county coroner. I shall share his story in a future post.