Outlaws Benjamin Bickerstaff and Josiah Thompson

On April 5, 1869, townsmen killed two men without a trial. T. U. Taylor's account in Frontier Times says they hid with loaded guns in the stores, and that buckshot struck Bickerstaff and Thompson as they tied their horses. Thompson fell at the first volley; Bickerstaff, hit three times, talked with the crowd before he died. Taylor says a federal reward of $1,000 had been posted for Bickerstaff in 1868. He and the plaque agree that Bickerstaff had shot a Black man in Louisiana, whom neither names.

What the plaque says

Outlaws Benjamin Bickerstaff and Josiah Thompson Near this site in 1869, Alvarado citizens ended the lives of outlaws Benjamin Bickerstaff and Josiah Thompson. A former Confederate veteran and prisoner of war, Bickerstaff was wanted for the murder of an African American man in Louisiana shortly after the Civil War. He later joined Alvarado business owner Josiah Thompson, also a Confederate veteran, and the two are believed to have participated in numerous robberies and murders in this area, including incidents in Alvarado. When they rode together into town on April 5, 1869, organized citizens shot them numerous times. They were buried in Balch (Old Alvarado) Cemetery. (2006)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Ellis County Courthouse — 21 mi
  J. Riely Gordon's courthouse of 1897 in Pecos red sandstone and pink granite, with twenty-one carved stone faces and two cornerstones left by a quarrel over its building.
• Cedar Ridge Preserve — 21 mi
  A 633-acre Audubon Dallas preserve at the western edge of Dallas County, with about nine miles of trails through prairie, woodland and escarpment hills.
• Cleburne State Park — 22 mi
  A 1930s Civilian Conservation Corps park on the old Chisholm Trail crossing country, with a spring-fed lake, a hand-carved three-tiered spillway and a CCC bridge in Johnson County.
• National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame — 25 mi
  A hall of fame begun in Hereford in 1975 to honor rodeo women, widened in 1977 to Western heritage, and housed in Fort Worth's Cultural District since 2002.

More markers nearby

• Alvarado — steps away
• Balch-Senterwood Cemetery — 0.3 mi
• Site of Norman Springs & Norman Grove — 1.2 mi
• Site of Ezell-McLeroy Cotton Gin — 2.2 mi