In the early history of paleontology in the United States, much of the attention (and notoriety) was centered around the two giants in the field, Othniel Charles Marsh of Yale College and Edward Drinker Cope of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. Both of these men were certainly major contributors to the science of paleontology, but they often overshadowed the work of many of the other people who actually collected and donated the fossils that subsequently made them famous. Nearly all of the important specimens discovered in Kansas during the late 1860s were collected by individuals who had no special training or real knowledge of fossils. While some did receive a brief credit in a scientific journal for their discovery, others were simply lost in history. This paper sheds some light on the adventurous life, and the important contributions of William E. Webb to the science of paleontology.