The Wild West Era lasted about 60 years, but it seems like a million stories have been told about the rough riding cowboys, slick shooting gunslingers and tenacious trailblazers who settled the West.
But this grim and gritty era in American history left us with far more questions than answers, and even those who spend their lives studying the era have a hard time agreeing on things like- Did Butch Cassidy ever return to the U.S.? Did Sheriff Pat Garrett actually kill Billy The Kid? and What happened to Pancho Villa's head?
mental_floss's Craig S. Baker interviewed Old West historian and treasure hunter W.C. Jameson about a year ago to get his take on some of the most enduring unsolved mysteries from the Wild West.
Jameson's theories challenge "traditionalist historian" views by proposing that Billy The Kid survived the Garrett encounter and actually returned to Texas in 1950 confessing his crimes.
He also says Butch Cassidy wasn't killed by the Bolivian military after all, a fact which is supported by Butch's friends and family members who claim to have been visited by him after he'd supposedly died.
But what about poor Pancho Villa's head? Nobody knows the answer to that one, not even an old cowboy like W.C. Jameson.