Emmett Dalton

Emmett Dalton was the youngest of the three Dalton brothers, part of a bandit gang notorious for robbing trains and banks in the Midwest during the late 1890s (interestingly, the brothers started their life of crime with a failed attempt at breaking into the safe on a Southern Pacific Railroad train in 1891 near San Luis Obispo, California). Emmett was shot several times and nearly died in the gang's infamous--and, as it turned out, futile--attempt to rob two banks simultaneously on October 5, 1892, in his hometown of Coffeyville, Kansas. Sentenced to life in prison, he served almost 15 years before being pardoned in 1907, in part because while in prison he found religion and rehabilitated himself to the satisfaction of prison authorities. Upon his release he married his childhood sweetheart and set out to rehabilitate the world--at least what he perceived as the world's proclivity to elevate outlaws to the status of heroes. Eventually his message came to Hollywood, where he acted in and consulted on several films about the "Wild West", at least two of them about his own folly as an outlaw. He also wrote the book "When the Daltons Rode," which was the basis of the western film When the Daltons Rode (1940). His exploits in life also include adventures in selling real estate and in advocating and campaigning for prison reform. He died in 1937 in Los Angeles, not too far from where Wyatt Earp (who had also found a place for himself in Hollywood) had also lived and died.