Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire I just watched The Highwaymen

Puzzled by this quote. Life expectancy was shorter back then but that was accidents and disease plus unsophisticated medical care, folks didn’t actually age any faster than we do now. This was even true in Colonial days when the life expectancy was only 35.

I think we’re close in age (I’m 48) although geographically you’re much closer to them than I am. I remember my grandma and grandpa talking about B&C along with other notorious outlaws of the day. I worked the ER with a nurse that was directly related to pretty boy Floyd and she had some good stories. I think back as a boy and those days seemed like they were an eternity ago but as I get older the decades get shorter and the “yesterday’s” blur together.

I just started the movie after watching Lord of War again, I can’t stand Nicholas Cage but I like the movie.

Very true! I read that if you made it to 30 your life expectancy was roughly the same as it is now, that goes back a couple hundred years at least. Accidents, disease and infection were the thieves of young lives.

Has anyone considered that Gault was an outdoorsman who spent many evenings around fires with his co-workers? They swapped stories and lies. I'm thinking he was embellishing a story for the benefit of his audience. We've all done it.

That doesn’t mean you were an old man at 50. That just means that there was a lot of infant mortality to keep the life expectancy averages down. And it also means that a lot more people back then died from those serious but imminently treatable things that start to hit people in their fifties.

I’m not sure Birdy. Both of my Great Grandfathers and Great Grandmothers on my dad’s side all looked roughly the same in photos of them in their 40s and 50s as they did when I got to know them when they were in their 80’s and 90’s. We have quite a few pictures of them back during the depression and they look old even in their 30’s. It was a rough life picking cotton and walking behind a mule all day plowing. Not to mention having babies in the front bedroom and having basically no real medical care.

Just my observations but the guys I’m talking about looked a hell of a lot older when they were in their 30’s like me than my dad and his brothers do in their 50’s and 60’s.

It’s widely reported that J Edgar Hoover was pissed that these “ two cowboys “ accomplished what his Federal Agents could not. Also reported that Hamer sent word that he and Gault would go get John Dillinger if Hoover asked them to.

I kind of grew up with stories of Bonnie and Clyde. The town I grew up in was on highway along their favored route. They had to go through dozens of times. One time two associates of theirs got in a shootout with the law on a bridge and hit the bushes on the river. They got away and one of them was picked up in Dallas three days later. Seems like I remember my Aunt Bill telling me that they had a cousin that south of town that they would stay with from time to time. But Aunt Bill died in 1988, so I can’t ask her.

Oh, yeah it is worth noting that Hamer was put on them in the middle of February 1934 and had them dead by May.

102 days on their trail is what Hamer said. I saw a copy of his expense report for the last half of February. Meals were 35 - 45 cents each and hotels were 1.75 to 2.00 per night for both he and Gault. Car mileage was paid at .03 per mile.

I was born in 1941 at Iowa Park Tx and as a very young child I recall grownups talking about a young couple from there who set out to copy Clyde and Bonnie but we’re killed in their first robbery attempt, I believe. That Robin Hood image of Clyde was still persistent at that time.

There was lots of talk about Pretty Boy Floyd as well, but I’d never heard of Dillinger or Kelly until much later. If you missed the news on the radio.....it just stayed missed. Living out in the country, newspapers were unheard of and with telephones being a town luxury, I reckon we would qualify as ignorant by today’s standards. Even the radio was battery powered and relied on a wind charger to keep the battery up, so it did not stay on all the time.

If you compare the then and now remaining life expectancies of people who've already reached 50, they'll be much closer because the infant mortality doesn't count. It'll all be in how well modern medicine can keep old people alive longer. Back then, when old people got real sick, pneumonia usually finished them off. Now medicine can often cure the pneumonia and they live until the next bad bug comes along. We have a habit of keeping people alive long after their time.

Just finished watching it. IMO, a very good show, and as best I remember....fairly accurate! memtb

During the early part of the depression, my parents hadn't met yet. Mom was starting college in Idaho and Dad was riding the rails, traveling all over the country along with thousands of other men, looking for work wherever they could find it. News like that didn't reach them very often.

Streaming on any Android streaming device. I watched it Friday night, the 29th, the same day it was generally distributed to the theaters, with the app called Cinema.

Thanks!

Great movie must watch

Charles Arthur Floyd hated his nickname. He was as well-liked amongst poor folks as B&C.

Then there was Baby Face Nelson. I know ALL about him because I watched 'Oh Brother, Where Art Thou'.

I did not see any "old man" angle played up in the film.

It simply noted that Hamer was past his prime for that sort of work but used his wit and experience to overcome any age issue.

In the context of what he took on, 50 is old. Especially in 1934. And consider the miles on a person's body then versus today. There were no crossfit gyms or paleo diets.

These were men.

Most of the historians don’t think that Bonnie was as actively involved in the actual killing as she was portrayed in the movie. For instance Methvin said that he was the one who opened up first on the cops in Grapevine and that it was because he misunderstood Clyde’s intentions when Clyde told him to take them hostage. He said that Bonnie only went out to them to see if she could help them, not to finish them off. And the eyewitness changed his story about what he saw about 27 times, so most historians don’t believe the account shown in the movie.

Mom was raised in the Texas Cotton patch of the 30’s. Her dad was a sharecropper. They had no love for these two white trash thieves (B&C). As far as they were concerned they were just murderin’ little punks. . The bank
never came and took anything from them as they had nothing to take.

I do remember my granddad talking about having to participate in shooting cattle to get the price of beef up. One of FDR’s brilliant schemes. They weren’t his cows. He just got conscripted to participate. He didn't even own a gun! Too damn poor to buy one. Someone loaned him one. Said it was the most terrible thing he ever had to do.