Wes McDougle (1858-1895) was an American outlaw of the Wild West. Born in Nacogdoches, Texas, Irvin was abandoned by his father Irvin McDougle, who went off to fight in the American Civil War in 1862 and fled to Mexico and the New Mexico Territory rather than surrender to the Union. Growing up on a struggling corn farm, Wes ran away from his heartbroken and abusive mother at the age of 13 and headed for El Paso, where he believed his father had fled. However, his father was mining in Sonora at the time, and Wes settled into El Paso's seedy frontier life, finding work as a cowboy and moonlighting as a rustler. After a failed ranch robbery in 1881 left a rancher dead, McDougle went on the run in the New Mexico badlands and found refuge in Hatch. Hunting to feed himself and acquire pocket money, McDougle headed to Silver City in 1885 on learning that his father had died there in a mining accident. While in Silver City, a grieving McDougle got into a barroom brawl with Philip "Flap Jack" Jackson, who, impressed with McDougle's criminal resume, took him on as muscle for his gang. After Jackson's capture and hanging in 1889, McDougle took over the Flap Jack Gang and fathered a child, Jack McDougle, with Nettie Hayward, a prostitute frequently in the gang's company. McDougle and his gang robbed trains coming out of El Paso and Tucson until, in 1895, he was finally captured by the law near Los Lunas and hanged.