Wichita in the 1870’s and later had more than its share of bad men. No one was quite sure why that was. Perhaps it was its climate with its tendency to be hot as hades and laced with the kind of humidity generally found in the Amazon, or the mind numbing cold during the winters that froze the souls of anyone foolish enough to spend time out of shelter, that caused some men to become the almost mythic kind of miscreants and evil doers that walked the face of the Earth.

Or could it have been the fact that you could see for two days in any direction at nothing but nothing. There were no geological features to stop the eyes endless searching for something to focus on rather than the horizon of the endless prairie. That’s enough to send some folks over the edge.

Or it could have been the fact of an element of accepted lawlessness by the inhabitants of the city that just took terrible behavior as a fact of life at the time. Bad men were bad men, that’s how it was. But some men were so bad that it couldn’t be allowed for them to walk free, unrepentant and not held accountable for their horrendous deeds. And allowed to do even worse if left to their own devices if they weren’t stopped.

What to do about these men who chose to live outside the Code of the West that attempted to impose some type of law and order to a place where it barely existed. How do you handle men that normal men were ill equipped to deal with. That’s where the Bounty Hunter came into play. He was a hard, dangerous individual in his own right, ruthless enough and capable enough to do whatever was necessary to bring these violent, uncontrollable men to whatever justice they were due. As the infamous reputations of these bad men grew it became more and more valuable to the townsfolk to pay someone to rid them of these menaces. So a Wanted Poster was created to name these individuals and their crimes and to place a price on their heads commensurate with their reputations. The worse the man was, the more he was worth dead or perhaps in jail, but usually dead. The poster did say Dead or Alive and it was usually easier to deal with a dead man than a live one.

Marshalls and Sheriffs took care of some of them but these villains were wily and tended to move around spreading their own special havoc wherever they landed. The Bounty Hunter was free to follow them wherever they went and once locating them, terminating their existence with all due dispatch and collecting the reward each had on their head.

Some might argue that these Bounty Hunters were just as bad as the men they hunted but the end result of ridding the earth of these individuals was worth having them around. At least til they spent their money and moved on.