The Frontierado Holiday is coming up on Friday, August 7th! As always, Frontierado is about the myth of the old west, not the grinding reality. Balladeer’s Blog’s looks at neglected gunslingers of the American west are always a hit each year and here is another one.
NOT Dangerous Dan Tucker
DANGEROUS DAN – David “Dangerous Dan” Tucker was no relation to the legendary “Ol’ Dan Tucker” from the folk song. This Dan Tucker was born in Canada in 1849 but his family moved south to the American state of Indiana when he was a child. In his late teens or early twenties, Tucker moved west to Colorado and began working as a machinist.
It was in Colorado that the soft-spoken young man picked up the handle Dangerous Dan (despite his real first name being David), a name he earned from being good with a gun during the wild and dangerous “Hell On Wheels” years of rapid railroad expansion throughout the Territory. By the mid-1870s this prototypical “strong, silent type” was forced to leave Colorado over a still-hazy incident in which he stabbed the wrong man to death.
Dangerous Dan relocated to New Mexico Territory, where he managed a Stage Coach Station near Fort Selden. That station was along the infamous Jornado del Muerto Desert, the “Journey of Death” between Santa Fe and El Paso. In his time there Tucker proved effective in fighting off attacks from Apaches, Mexican bandits and occasional homegrown outlaw gangs.
By the summer of 1875 the legendary Sheriff Harvey Whitehill of Silver City, NM (Grant County) hired Dan as a deputy, kicking off the most well-known period of the gunslinger’s life. Early in 1876, outside Johnny Hall’s Dance Hall & Saloon on Broadway in Silver City, a man was fleeing after having disemboweled another man in the saloon, only to fall to Dangerous Dan’s gun. Continue reading
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