A minor but enduring figure in the outlaw culture of the late nineteenth-century American West, Daugherty outlasted every other member of the Wild Bunch — a distinction that says something about both his luck and his era's violent attrition. His trajectory from a preacher's household in Missouri to a cattle-country gang is a compact illustration of how the frontier absorbed and shaped young men with few other prospects. The Battle of Ingalls, where he was captured, remains one of the more documented confrontations between federal marshals and organized outlaws of the period.

His eleven-year rule over Equatorial Guinea resulted in the deaths or exile of a significant portion of the country's population, the dismantling of its infrastructure, and the near-total collapse of its economy. Having consolidated power rapidly after independence through a cult of personality, a single-party state, and a self-declared presidency for life, he presided over a campaign of persecution that fell especially hard on non-Fang ethnic and religious minorities. The scale of destruction relative to the country's small population makes his tenure among the more comprehensively ruinous of the postcolonial era.