![[Linked Image]](https://trapperman.com/forum/attachments/usergals/2025/09/full-1790-269335-1000022585.jpg)
1876 brought the James-Younger gang to ruin in the fields of Minnesota, where desperation and gunfire collided beneath the September sky. Charlie Pitts, outlaw and gambler of chance, met his final hour at Hanska Slough, cut down in the smoke of a posse’s rifles. The Northfield raid had promised riches, but it delivered only blood and the long reach of frontier justice. His body, once swift in the saddle, was left still in the wet grass where flight ended and death claimed its prize.
The photograph that followed did not seek to flatter. John Tackett’s lens caught Pitts as the frontier remembered him—not in motion, not in defiance, but in silence. The post-mortem portrait fixed his face among the countless others who tested the limits of law and lost. Where once there had been fire and bravado, now only the chill of mortality remained, his features set in the stark truth that every outlaw must reckon with.
Such images endure because they whisper of the chase, of the thunder of hooves through slough and field, of the moment when the hunted turn to fight and the hunters do not yield. Pitts’ photograph is not merely of a man—it is the relic of a pursuit that sealed the fate of a gang, a reminder that the frontier did not forgive miscalculation. In that still frame rests both an ending and a lesson: that the West carried no sentiment, only the finality of lead and the unblinking eye of the camera.
![[Linked Image]](https://trapperman.com/forum/attachments/usergals/2025/09/full-105-269349-img_5546.jpeg)
