The Shirt of a Condemned Man

The hanging of Tom Horn on November 20, 1903, marked the end of the Old West, a place and an era ultimately strangled by railroads, telegraph wires, fences and other newfangled trappings of a new century that included the mechanical gallows tripped by Horn’s own weight, the ultimate expression of the yet-to-be-coined term “self-service.” Horn, a celebrated U.S. Army scout and former lawman, had been a notorious enforcer for cattle interests, with the ambiguous title “range detective.�