Cullen Baker

Cullen Montgomery Baker was an American outlaw active in Arkansas, northeast Texas and adjoining border country during the Civil War and Reconstruction era. Born in 1835, he served in Confederate forces for part of the war and became notorious for killings, robberies and attacks carried out during the disorder that followed.

Baker became one of the best-known outlaws of the immediate post-Civil War border region and a figure through whom later writers interpreted Reconstruction violence and frontier legend. Cullen Baker was born in Weakley County, Tennessee and died in Texas.

In Louis L’Amour’s The First Fast Draw, set in Reconstruction-era East Texas after the American Civil War, Louis L’Amour fictionalizes the life of Cullen Baker as a feared gunman returning to a region shaped by occupation, old grudges and postwar violence, where enemies force him into repeated confrontations.