CALIFORNIA JIM – The Frontierado Holiday is coming up on Friday, August 4th, so here is another blog post in honor of the season. California Jim was also known as Six-Shooter Jim Smith and Six-Shooter Bill, but on his deathbed, he claimed that his real name was John Henry Hankins (some sources say Jankins or Hawkins).

A large part of California Jim’s history is known only from that deathbed confession, with periodic news reports or journals offering supplementary information. Jim was born around 1856 in either Texas or Missouri, depending on which source you go by.

In his teens, California Jim supposedly went to California, where he spent some of the 1870s pulling off masked robberies of gold shipments and mine payrolls. By 1877 or 1878, this man had wandered back to Texas, where he shot to death a man in Cooke County and took it on the run.

Jim…