The Wild West is usually told as sheriffs versus bandits, but the Dalton brothers wore the badge before they robbed the trains. Born into a family of 15 children whose mother, Adeline Younger, was aunt to Cole and Jim Younger, the Daltons first followed their older brother Frank, a respected deputy U.S. marshal killed by whiskey bootleggers in 1887. Grat and Bob took up his work, and Emmett guarded prisoners, but the fee-based marshal system paid nothing unless a fugitive reached court, and the brothers began stealing horses to survive.

This episode follows the slide into full-time crime: the 1891 Southern Pacific robbery in California, Grat’s trial sabotaged by a defense attorney secretly on the railroad’s payroll, his jailbreak using a saw blade hidden with soap and soot, and a Christmas Eve ambush he escaped on a stolen plow horse. It covers Bob’s organized gang, its canyon hideouts, informant Eugenia Moore, the Red Rock train robbery of June 1892, and Bill Dalton’s hotel-lobby alibi in front of a federal judge. It ends on October 5, 1892 in Coffeyville, Kansas, where Bob’s plan to rob two banks at once and outdo Jesse James collapsed in Death Alley, leaving four outlaws and four citizens dead and Emmett shot 23 times.

• Why a $50,000 haul yielded only $1,800 in usable money
• How a bank manager’s lie about a time lock cost the gang ten fatal minutes
• Emmett Dalton’s 14 years in prison, 1907 pardon, and Hollywood second act
• Bill Dalton’s later Wild Bunch years and death in a cornfield in 1894
• The unresolved mystery of a possible sixth rider who slipped away