Alias Frank Canton

Here for the first time is the complete life story of the controversial lawman Frank Canton, born Joe Horner, who, after conviction and imprisonment for armed robbery, escaped to change his name and transform himself into an ambitious, hard-working peace officer pursuing felons all over the western frontier for almost half a century.

Canton was active in widely separate sections of the country--Texas, Wyoming, Oklahoma, and Alaska--during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth. Western historian Robert K. DeArment has tracked down the facts of the mysterious Canton’s early life and misdeeds in Texas; his participation in the Johnson Country War as an agent of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association; his pursuit of the Daltons, Bill Doolin, and other outlaws in Oklahoma Territory; his experiences as a peace officer and gold prospector in Alaska; his career as a bounty hunter; and his ultimate success as adjutant general of the new state of Oklahoma.

Robert K. DeArment is a University of Toledo, Ohio, graduate whose special field of interest is nineteenth-century American history with special emphasis on outlaws and law enforcement in the frontier West. He is the author of Bat Masterson: The Man and the Legend, also published by the University of Oklahoma Press.