Book Description

This true crime history of the American Frontier separates fact from fiction with in-depth profiles of thirty-eight career criminals and infamous outlaw gangs. In the years following the American Civil War, the country’s western frontier was home to a prodigious number of myth-making cowboys, infamous gunslingers, saloon madams, and not always law-abiding lawmen. But the romantic mystique of these individuals and the time in which they lives is largely the product of novelists and filmmakers. In Outlaws of the Wild West, Terry Treadwell presents the real stories behind such legends as Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy, the Dalton Brothers, and others—as well as their lesser-known but equally criminal peers. Here are the stories of William Clark Quantrill and his Confederate Army unit, Quantrill’s Raiders, who turned hit-and-run raids into a way of life; Henry Starr, the Native American career criminal who went on to play himself in the movie of his life; Ann and Josie Bassett, the sisters who defended their ranch from cattle barons with the help of Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch; and many more.