Outlaw Name Generator

Real Wild West outlaws were mostly ordinary frontier men with ordinary names, which is why the ones that stuck to them were nicknames. A wanted poster needed something memorable, so newspapers and lawmen tagged bandits with a physical trait (Big Nose George, Flat-Nose Currie, Three-Fingered Jack), a home range (Arkansas Tom, Tulsa Jack, Bitter Creek Newcomb), a habit (Dirty Dave, Mysterious Dave, Dynamite Dick), or simply Kid if they were young (Billy the Kid, Kid Curry, the Apache Kid). Given names of the era were Old Testament and old English: Jesse, Cole, Emmett, Silas, Jubal, Zebulon, Hattie, Etta.

The frontier was more diverse than the movies suggest. Mexican and Californio bandits like Joaquin Murrieta and Tiburcio Vasquez, Black lawmen and outlaws like Bass Reeves and Isom Dart, and Cherokee and Creek figures like Ned Christie and Rufus Buck all belong in a realistic cast. Women outlaws ran the gamut from Belle Starr and Pearl Hart to saloon queens like Poker Alice.

This list mixes documented names with invented ones built on the same patterns, so you can name a whole gang for a Red Dead campaign, a Deadlands table, or a western novel: a leader with a proper name, a couple of nicknamed hands, and one Kid.