Texas Gunslingers

Texas Gunslingers
Author: Bill O'Neal
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Total Pages: 128
Release: 2014
Genre: History
ISBN: 1467132713

Images of America: Texas Gunslingers presents the concept of Texas as the Gunfighter Capital of the West. Indeed, after the cowboy--a Texas creation--the most colorful and romanticized frontier figure is the gunfighter. Nothing is more dramatic than life and death conflict, and the image of men in big hats and boots brandishing six-shooters and Winchesters has been portrayed in countless Western novels, movies, and television shows. Texas made an enormous contribution to gunfighter lore. Texas Rangers were responsible for the evolution of Sam Colt's revolving pistol, key weapon of gunfighters. More shoot-outs occurred in Texas than in any other state or territory. More gunfighters were from Texas, including kill-crazy Wes Hardin and Killin' Jim Miller, the West's premier assassin. There were more blood feuds in Texas than in any other state. Frequently, gunplay erupted in towns such as Tascosa, El Paso, Fort Worth, and Lampasas, where four lawmen were killed in an 1873 saloon battle.

Gunslingers

Gunslingers
Author: John Layne
Publisher:
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2019-07-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781645310792

Joel Thornton is a retired US deputy marshal now living a quiet rancher's life outside the Texas town named in his honor. Days after welcoming his daughter, Elizabeth, home after seven years back east in Philadelphia, an old fugitive attacks the Tilted T Ranch seeking revenge and Thornton's cattle. Wounded in the ensuing gunfight, Thornton calls upon his daughter to find his old partner, former US Deputy Marshal Ben Chance, informing her, "Chance will know what to do." The young woman's journey leads her on an adventure that exposes her to the dangers of the Old West, including an Indian attack on her stagecoach, where a mysterious gunslinger emerges from the hills and saves the coach. Enchanted by Elizabeth and her quest, the gunslinger joins her in the search for her father's former partner, who unbeknownst to them has been wounded in a gunfight, having been saved by a young brash gunslinger on a secret mission of his own. Together, the two young gunslingers join the aged former Marshal Chance in the hunt for the outlaws who shot Elizabeth's father and stole his herd.

Encyclopedia of Western Gunfighters

Encyclopedia of Western Gunfighters
Author: Bill O'Neal
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 404
Release: 1979
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780806123356

Sifting factual information from among the lies, legends, and tall tales, the lives and battles of gunfighters on both sides of the law are presented in a who's who of the violent West

Gunfighter Nation

Gunfighter Nation
Author: Richard Slotkin
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 868
Release: 1998
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780806130316

Examines the ways in which the frontier myth influences American culture and politics, drawing on fiction, western films, and political writing

Western Gunslingers in Fact and on Film

Western Gunslingers in Fact and on Film
Author: Buck Rainey
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2015-11-17
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1476603286

Billy the Kid, Wild Bill Hickok, Belle Starr, Wyatt Earp, the Younger Gang, the Dalton-Doolin Gang and Bat Masterson--these real-life lawmen and lawbreakers have been the basis of so many Hollywood Westerns that it has become difficult to discover where the truth ends and the legend begins. All actually became larger-than-life characters during their lifetimes, as contemporary newspapers and books embellished their deeds for their own purposes. But it was in Hollywood that the line between reality and myth was completely blurred. Each chapter-length entry here first focuses on the known facts of the people's lives and how each became truly legendary during their lifetimes. The reality is then compared to how they have been portrayed in the movies.

The Gunslingers

The Gunslingers
Author: John F. Wukovits
Publisher: Facts On File
Total Pages: 70
Release: 1996-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780791038727

Describes the exploits of some of the men in the Old West, including John Wesley Hardin, Billy the Kid, Doc Holliday, and James Butler Hickok, who earned reputations for being deadly with a gun.

Texas' Last Frontier

Texas' Last Frontier
Author: Clayton W. Williams
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2000-06
Genre:
ISBN: 9781585440719

For almost three hundred miles, the Pecos River cuts across far West Texas. It is an arid land, a land that in the last century offered danger and hardship to those who crossed it and those who settled it. Yet they came--army posts like Fort Stockton to challenge the Apaches' claim to the rugged land, settlers to supply the posts, cattlemen to eke out a living from the vast but sparse grazing ranges. They came and they stayed because the land held one overriding appeal: it was Texas' last frontier. The newcomers--cattlemen and sheepmen, individuals and corporations--included sturdy, law-abiding, industrious citizens, such as O.W. Williams, a renowned surveyor, jurist, and historian with a law degree from Harvard; Mexicans, both poor laborers and well-to-do entrepreneurs; kindly German merchants; fighting Irishmen; and fearless Anglo cowboys. There were also the gunslingers, including Sheriff A.J. Royal, who terrorized the citizenry, even after Texas Rangers had arrived, until he was mysteriously shot to death one afternoon, possibly by one of the town's leading men. The most detailed and thorough account available of the history of far West Texas, this tale is colored with human interest and drama. It will prove invaluable to scholars and richly rewarding to all those interested in the history of Texas and of the West.

American Triumvirate

American Triumvirate
Author: James Dodson
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2013-02-26
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 0307473554

With compelling detail and pure passion, James Dodson recounts the singular brilliance of three golf titans and how they saved the professional tour and created the game as we know it today. During the Depression golf was in crisis. As a spectator sport it was on the verge of extinction. This was the unhappy prospect facing Sam Snead, Byron Nelson, and Ben Hogan –two dirt-poor boys from Texas and another from Virginia, who had dedicated themselves to the sport. But then lightning struck, and from the late thirties into the fifties these three men were so thoroughly dominant that they transformed both how the game was played and how society regarded it. Paving the way for the subsequent popularity of players from Arnold Palmer to Tiger Woods, they were, and will always remain, a triumvirate for the ages.

Making a Modern U.S. West

Making a Modern U.S. West
Author: Sarah Deutsch
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 666
Release: 2022
Genre: History
ISBN: 1496229568

To many Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the West was simultaneously the greatest symbol of American opportunity, the greatest story of its history, and the imagined blank slate on which the country’s future would be written. From the Spanish-American War in 1898 to the Great Depression’s end, from the Mississippi to the Pacific, policymakers at various levels and large-scale corporate investors, along with those living in the West and its borderlands, struggled over who would define modernity, who would participate in the modern American West, and who would be excluded. In Making a Modern U.S. West Sarah Deutsch surveys the history of the U.S. West from 1898 to 1940. Centering what is often relegated to the margins in histories of the region—the flows of people, capital, and ideas across borders—Deutsch attends to the region’s role in constructing U.S. racial formations and argues that the West as a region was as important as the South in constructing the United States as a “white man’s country.” While this racial formation was linked to claims of modernity and progress by powerful players, Deutsch shows that visions of what constituted modernity were deeply contested by others. This expansive volume presents the most thorough examination to date of the American West from the late 1890s to the eve of World War II.

In Search of Butch Cassidy

In Search of Butch Cassidy
Author: Larry Pointer
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2013-07-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0806187204

Who was Butch Cassidy? He was born Robert LeRoy Parker in 1866 in Utah. And, as everyone knows, after years of operating with a sometime gang of outlaws known as the Wild Bunch, he and the Sundance Kid escaped to South America, only to die in a 1908 shootout with a Bolivian cavalry troop. But did he die? Some say that he didn’t die in Bolivia, but returned to live out a quiet life in Spokane, Washington where he died peacefully in 1937. In interviews with the author, scores of his friends and relatives and their descendants in Wyoming, Utah, and Washington concurred, claiming that Butch Cassidy had returned from Bolivia and lived out the remainder of his life in Spokane under the alias William T. Phillips. In 1934 William T. Phillips wrote an unpublished manuscript, an (auto) biography of Butch Cassidy, “The Bandit Invincible, the Story of Butch Cassidy.” Larry Pointer, marshalling an overwhelming amount of evidence, is convinced that William T. Phillips and Butch Cassidy were the same man. The details of his life, though not ending spectacularly in a Bolivian shootout, are more fascinating than the until-now accepted version of the outlaw’s life. There was a shootout with the Bolivian cavalry, but, according to Butch (Phillips), he was able to escape under the cover of darkness, sadly leaving behind his longtime friend, the Sundance Kid, dead. Then came Paris, a minor bit of facelifting, Michigan, marriage, Arizona, Mexico with perhaps a tour as a sharpshooter for Pancho Villa, Alaska, and at last the life of a businessman in Spokane. In between there were some quiet return trips to visit old friends and haunts in Wyoming and Utah. The author, with the invaluable help of Cassidy’s autobiography, has pieced together the full and final story of a remarkable outlaw—from his Utah Mormon origins, through his escapades of banditry and his escape to South America, to his self-rehabilitation as William T. Phillips, a productive and respected member of society.