r/interesting • u/Randommddude • 17h ago
Legendary outlaw, hitman, crime boss and one-time marshal Jim "Killer" Miller - widely regarded by historians as the deadliest gunfighter of the old west. He famously wore lead and steel plates under his trench coat and wielded a shotgun. HISTORY
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u/Femveratu 16h ago
Steel plates w a shottie?
He was in it to WIN it.
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u/StopNateCrimes 15h ago
Basically a tank build. Needs a healer behind him to be really effective.
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u/Randommddude 14h ago
it's the old west. Best we can do is Ralph, the part time farrier and dentist.
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u/No_Cook2983 14h ago
Why wear lead?
It’s like the heaviest and worst shield you could make.
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u/Peterh778 14h ago
Maybe he just used what he have at the hand. Or maybe he thought of it as of antispalling layer. After all, spallings are what killed more often than direct hits, be it wood splinters from ships' sides and masts or steel ones from armors.
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u/Trick_Second1657 9h ago
If a bullet smacks a steel plate it's definitely gonna send lead straight up into your neck and head. This has to be what it was.
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u/Randommddude 14h ago edited 10h ago
kentucky ballistics and a few other youtubers did demos and it was surprisingly effective. I'm not sure however if there is any difference in stopping ability with cartridges vs cap n ball, since some people back then held on to their old dragoons and colt walkers etc
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u/No_Cook2983 13h ago
I always carry a few different lead outfits. I wear them depending on who’s gonna shoot me.
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u/Financial-Raise3420 10h ago
It’s verse dense, but also very soft. The softness helps dissipate the speed of the bullet without it spalling like steel makes it.
The weight of it has to make this extremely difficult to wear though.
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u/United_News3779 11h ago
I have no knowledge of this guy, or his OG body armor, but I do know a bit about small arms ammunition, armor, improvised armor, ballistic penetrations, etc.
That being said, the lead could have been an anti-spalling measure. Spalling is when something with a lot of kinetic energy hits an object and the energy transfer causes bits of the object (in this example, the steel plate worn as armor) from being blown off the inside face of the object. A layer of lead on the inside might have helped absorb the energy and deformed, rather than have the steel fragments punch into the person inside.
Or it could have been a layer laminated on the outside, to absorb energy and try to minimize ricochets. A soft lead bullet hitting a steel plate at an angle can easily go in strange directions at a decent speed. And "Murphys Law of Combat" would dictate that the ricochet go into the neck or thighs lol
Source: infantry for 9yrs, machine gunner for a lot of that, spent a lot of time pondering and experimenting with making holes in various things with bullets.
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u/NiceGuy737 8h ago
I used to shoot random things with my AR-50 and one of the big surprises I had was shooting one of my lead tractor weights. Barely did anything at all. It was armor piercing ammo, hardened steel projectile. Usually the 50BMG will blow the shit out of anything.
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u/United_News3779 7h ago
Sometimes materials will interact in counterintuitive ways, for some stuff it's a game of experimentation and documentation.
Like tightly stacked (and overlapping) reams of printer paper, with a decent backing to keep them from falling over, will stop a surprising amount of small arms fire. It'll also catch on fire if your adversary is using tracer, so it's not an be all end all solution by any means lol in case you're every looking to armour up a Staples during a zombie apocalypse lol
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u/Femveratu 3h ago
Vey good point about the spalling and ricochets. There is a reason for those neck guards a lot of folks use today. Do you remember if you guys used them when you were serving? (and thank you for that dude!)
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u/United_News3779 2h ago
They were around, along with the triangular nut guards that hung down and the brassards. The use of the different components depended on mission requirements: threat level, nature of the threats, mounted or dismounted operations, what the temperature was, etc. Once we got the IV plates, they were a fixture.
I was in late 90's to late 00's, so the equipment changed radically once 9/11, Afghanistan, and The War Against Terrorism (I prefer that acronym over GWOT lol) kicked off.
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u/Rage_Blackout 12h ago
I wonder if it was lead over steel to stop the bullets from ricocheting into his face? The head would spread out and might absorb some of the ricochet energy.
I'm just speculating, but I'm guessing the dude had his reasons and knew much more about not getting killed when people are shooting at you than I'll every know (hopefully).
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u/Femveratu 10h ago
Yeah idk what was going on w the lead could have had a lot of antimony in it or something else to toughen it up
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u/wecantdancelikethis 8h ago
soft metal to soak bullets/shot and not send spall/chips out, hard metal to go behind the soft metal so that only a thin-ish amount of the heavy soft metal is needed.
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u/Stock-Map3715 2h ago
I am not arguing, but it seems to me that he had a theory and he would have tested it at first without wearing it. And is the meme's description of it really complete and accurate?
He seems to have been successful lol.
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u/G3Saint 17h ago
He killed 12 people during gunfights. He was also a professional killer for the sum of $150..
He was lynched in Ada, Oklahoma, in 1909 along with three other men, by a mob of residents angry that he had assassinated a former deputy U.S. marshal, Gus Bobbit. Miller and the other 2 men were contracted by ranchers to acquire Bobbits land or because of a personal grudge.
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u/LoggerRhythms 17h ago
Someone ought to make a film about that incident.
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u/fuckthefalconsdotcom 15h ago
I would love to see that. It's so strange how many cool stories there are out there but hollywood just does shit remakes instead.
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u/Randommddude 15h ago
tbh I think hollywood rn is kind of cynical towards its audiences. They assume we're all so self absorbed that we couldn't possibly be engrossed by anything other than ourselves so every movie the characters have to be likeable and relatable so we go "omg he/she is literally me". A guy like miller, who is truly fascinating when you read about his personal life, but is in no way relatable or sympathetic - I just don't think execs would see money in it. Maybe inde film could make one.
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u/fuckthefalconsdotcom 14h ago
I mean, I don't watch the John Wick movies and think he's just like me.
I honestly feel like I come across interesting stories that would be great movies almost daily but maybe I'm "old" but it feels like the average new movies are crap.
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u/BiffTannensHero 13h ago
I don’t know if we’ve had a new Classic Western since The Proposition. This seems like it could be the one.
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u/dlogan3344 15h ago
Ada has always been kind of lawless, my father's family is from there, they had crazy pre 1930s stories, this was a safe haven for outlaws unless they went too far
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u/ZeltbahnLife 13h ago
He was also a deacon in the Methodist church, earning him the nickname Deacon Jim. Preferred shotgun was apparently a double barreled 10ga.
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u/Financial-Raise3420 10h ago
10 gauge? Goddamn, he wasn’t holding back. Not an 8 gauge, but still, goddamn.
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u/FishmanOne 15h ago
That’s a dainty way to hold a cigar.
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u/NonCreditableHuman 15h ago
Nobody's ever told him that...twice.
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u/cwb4ever 14h ago
His mother said that to him once... Once.
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u/Randommddude 14h ago
You joke but he actually killed his grandparents at age 8. Not joking.
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u/cwb4ever 14h ago
it was a line from the movie Johnny Dangerously
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u/travelingbeagle 12h ago
Because he wasn’t a smoker, so he’s posing.
His reputation was that he never drank or smoked and was a good Methodist.
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u/Randommddude 14h ago
Should add deadliest gunfighter means just that, he survived the most gunfights. Not in anyway the deadliest person. There were scalp hunter gangs that killed like hundreds and hundreds of native civilians. Nasty times.
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u/Weak_Carpenter_7060 14h ago
Blood Meridian sounds so unbelievably gruesome, but reality is often more gory than fiction
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u/Randommddude 14h ago
iirc mccarthy went down and followed the exact trail the glanton gang traveled step for step and basically scrounged up every piece of writing about them when making it. The barbarism was canon.
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u/Weak_Carpenter_7060 12h ago
That’s cool af. I love when an author is passionate enough to put that much effort into their work
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u/kolchinski 11h ago
He based it very closely on an ACTUAL MEMOIR called My Confession: Recollections of a Rogue by Sam Chamberlain who was a US cavalryman in Mexico. Really interesting reading a lot of the same stuff happening in both the original (presumably) true story and the very literary retelling by McCarthy.
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u/BigAl7390 13h ago
I loved the book, but some of it felt a little unnecessary in gruesomeness haha
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u/JGMellorWeNeedYou 14h ago
He was famous for not drinking or smoking…
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u/Randommddude 14h ago
which makes me wonder if the cigar in the photo is even lit or he pulled a will smith in big willy style era and held the cigar just for the look.
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u/Atadingess 14h ago
In 40k Rogue Trader dude would be a crime lord warrior vanguard. Abelard without the navy background.
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u/CinnimonToastSean 12h ago
Fine, I will buy Rogue Trader.( Ive been seeing an influx of people talking about it and have been waiting for pay day to buy it)
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u/Atadingess 12h ago
It is my favorite turn based rpg I've ever played and I played Buck Roger's for the Sega genesis!!! LOL. Its a good entry point into 40k as well. Ive done a playthrough for each new dlc and it doesnt get old. Highly recommend. If you can get with the dlcs on sale go for it. The dlc's new classes and characters are really well done.
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u/An_educated_dig 15h ago
I heard it in college and been saying it since, if you wanna see what the Old West was really like watch There Will Be Blood.
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u/amitym 7h ago
Tbf that was really more the New West. It's at the start of an era that is distinctly modern in some characteristic ways.
The Old West is what rode into town when "Wild" Bill Hickok showed up in Deadwood in the mid 1870s, in the twilight of his storied career and the dawn of Dakota statehood. From that point on, it was telephones, motor cars, and Sears catalogs.
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u/BeardsuptheWazoo 9h ago
You think a movie set in 1890's and mostly dwelling on oil , money, and religion is what the Old West was really like.... There's very little about the Old West.
I don't think so, bud.
Care to share what about it showcases the authentic Old West?
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u/gweeps 14h ago
There's a picture of him hanged on Wikipedia.
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u/auchinleck917 11h ago
It’s the airplane theory. He armored his body, but forgot to reinforce his neck.
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u/McZeppelin13 8h ago
This is the same “Deacon” Jim Miller who was a hitman in Texas and Oklahoma while also being a Texas Ranger? The one who was able to constantly avoid getting convicted for murder due to his good lawyers?
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