Mrs. Dalton’s Boys, part 2
Adeline Dalton, though surely sadden over losing Frank, must have been mighty proud that three of her boys were now up and coming lawmen in the wide-open Oklahoma Territory. And at the time, as all sort of questionable characters were more or less making the area their stomping grounds, the territory needed all of the straight-shooting lawmen it could get. But all of those gun-slinging and whiskey-swilling fellows may have been a bad influence on the three Dalton defenders.
Daily, the three Dalton boys had to put up with the Oklahoma low-lives expounding on their wild and profitable exploits. It may have been just such tales of abundant ill-gotten coinage, as well as the display of such, which caused the upstanding reputations of the Daltons to start sliding down the wrong side of hill.
You see, the three lawmen were earning only a few grubby dollars for their efforts at attempting to keep the peace. They were getting $2.00 for each arrest, then ten cents a mile for bringing in prisoners. And that meager mileage reimbursement was only paid for one way. The fact that they were also to get forty cents a day for feeding a prisoner being brought in didn't go far to put much more than beans and a bit of bacon over the fire. But that wasn't all. On top of all this measly and hard-earned wealth, the marshal took a cut out of each deputy's pay. What with drawing this top dollar it wasn't long before the boys sort of did their math and evidently figured out how to give themselves a considerable pay raise.
It's believed that Bob Dalton, the next to the youngest, went into the cattle business while he was on the trail of cattle thieves. You might say he sort of 'rustled around' some while out on the trail. It wasn't long before his brothers felt inclined to give him a helping hand. It was a pretty slick and safe setup considering they were working under the guise of good upstanding citizens-and wearing badges.
A little rustling on the side by the Dalton boys might have gone unnoticed if one night, in December of 1888, Bob and Emmett hadn't drove a buckboard over to the undertaker's home near Timberhills, Oklahoma. There, they roused the undertaker out of bed and dropped the body of a man on the undertaker's doorstep. This fellow, who was leaking puddles of blood on the step, was a rancher by the name of Charlie Montgomery. The boys' explanation, at the time, was that they'd caught Montgomery in the act of robbing a store and had to kill him in self-defense. They had abandoned the body at the undertakers because, as lawmen, they were required to bury him at their own expense.
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