Deadwood in my Blood: Boone May, Gale Hill, Shotgun Messengers on the Deadwood Stage, and Their Historic Families

The first volume in this series highlights two pioneer families that produced half of the first elite eight guards employed to protect the Deadwood Stage in 1876. Shotgun messengers Gale Hill, Boone May, Jim May, and Bill May had been overlooked for more than a century, according to many historians familiar with early Deadwood. This is the first publication to record their history and family connections. This narrative explores how their extended family groups migrate from Kentucky, to Missouri, Kansas Territory, Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma Indian Territory. During the Civil War, these men began freighting into New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, and eventually all the way to Deadwood. These men were freighters and trailblazers who were hired to guard the famous treasure coach, which carried gold from the Black Hills, over 200 miles along the Deadwood Trail, to the Cheyenne Depot. Each messenger’s immediate family members, our ancestors, are intertwined with their historical narrative. The first volume in this series takes a genealogy approach in presenting our American History. This different look at our past, through the eyes of some of our ancestors, offers a more personal touch that results in a lasting impression, not usually obtained when studying Westward Expansion. Images of ancestors associated with historic events enable them to be brought into greater clarity using new research techniques in a digital age. Such historic accounts in our ancestor’s lives enables the reader to understand them better than just the cursory impression gained from faded photographs or a few vital statistics in family registers.