04/09/2025
Tom “Black Jack” Ketchum and his brother Sam lived in that hazy twilight where cowboys and outlaws often blurred into the same figure. They started honest, riding the ranges of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona—branding cattle, trailing herds through dust storms, and living the hard grind of frontier labor. But when wages dried up and temptation whispered louder than duty, their saddlebags shifted from rope and branding irons to pistols and stolen loot. The Ketchums turned toward the outlaw’s path, finding their names carried further with every train and bank robbery across the Southwest.
By the 1890s, the Santa Fe rail lines trembled at the mention of their gang. Tom, with his cold gaze and hair-trigger draw, became known as “Black Jack,” though some claimed the name came from mistaken identity. No matter—the blood and dollars stolen soon carved his own infamy. Sam, quieter but calculating, proved just as dangerous, orchestrating raids that left lawmen always a step behind. Their knack for disappearing into canyons and desert hideouts only deepened the legend, making them shadows on the horizon: unseen, but always feared.
The end came swift and brutal. Sam fell in a gunfight in 1899, leaving Tom to ride alone. A botched train robbery near Folsom, New Mexico sealed his fate. Captured, tried, and sentenced, he became the only man ever executed in the state for “felonious assault upon a train.” But the gallows brought not justice, only horror. On April 26, 1901, the drop went wrong—the rope too long. Before the crowd’s stunned eyes, Black Jack was decapitated, his death as violent and haunting as the life he had led.
Thus ended the Ketchums’ tale: two brothers who straddled the line between working cowboys and outlaws, their names forever etched in the brutal poetry of the Old West.