The short, bloody career of "Bronco Bill" Walters and his gang captures the devil-may-care violence of the Wild West. In this detailed narrative of the gang's crime spree in territorial New Mexico and Arizona, two experts in outlaw history offer a gunshot-by-gunshot account of how some especially dangerous outlaws plied their trade in 1898. William Walters reached New Mexico Territory from Texas in the late 1880s and quickly gained a reputation for his ability to sit a horse and for his violent ways. The Bronco Bill Gang skillfully dissects his propensity for trouble and shows how he soon found himself in the territorial penitentiary. In the spring of 1898, after a sojourn stealing horses in Arizona, Walters and four apprentice outlaws turned to armed robbery, holding up passenger trains on the Santa Fe Railroad in Grants and Belén, New Mexico. By the time a Wells Fargo posse captured Bronco Bill, two of the outlaws, two deputies, and a Navajo tracker had been killed in gunfights. Anyone with a taste for western history or an interest in New Mexico and Arizona in the bad old days will find this book irresistible. The authors' attention to the ways Bill and his men fell into a life of crime shows us the real West, where cowboys and gunmen could wind up on either side of the law. The Bronco Bill Gang is the first book to explore this fabled band of outlaws who crisscrossed the American Southwest.

Each volume in this series features approximately fifteen short biographies of notorious bad guys, perpetrators of mischief, visionary if misunderstood thinkers, and other colorful antiheroes from the history of a given state. The villainous, the misguided, and the misunderstood all get their due in these entertaining yet informing books.

The true stories of the Wild West heroes who guarded the iconic Wells Fargo stagecoaches and trains, battling colorful thieves, vicious highwaymen, and robbers armed with explosives. The phrase "riding shotgun" was no teenage game to the men who guarded stagecoaches and trains the Western frontier. Armed with sawed-off, double-barreled shotguns and an occasional revolver, these express messengers guarded valuable cargo through lawless terrain. They were tough, fighting men who risked their lives every time they climbed into the front boot of a Concord coach. Boessenecker introduces soon-to-be iconic personalities like "Chips" Hodgkins, an express rider known for his white mule and his ability to outrace his competitors, and Henry Johnson, the first Wells Fargo detective. Their lives weren't just one shootout after another—their encounters with desperadoes were won just as often with quick wits and memorized-by-heart knowledge of the land. The highway robbers also get their due. It wouldn't be a book about the Wild West without Black Bart, the most infamous stagecoach robber of all time, and Butch Cassidy's gang, America's most legendary train robbers. Through the Gold Rush and the early days of delivery with horses and saddlebags, to the heyday of stagecoaches and huge shipments of gold, and finally the rise of the railroad and the robbers who concocted unheard-of schemes to loot trains, Wells Fargo always had courageous men to protect its treasure. Their unforgettable bravery and ingenuity make this book a thrilling read.

Bad Company and Burnt Powder is a collection of twelve stories of when things turned "Western" in the nineteenth-century Southwest. Each chapter deals with a different character or episode in the Wild West involving various lawmen, Texas Rangers, outlaws, feudists, vigilantes, lawyers, and judges. Covered herein are the stories of Cal Aten, John Hittson, the Millican boys, Gid Taylor and Jim and Tom Murphy, Alf Rushing, Bob Meldrum and Noah Wilkerson, P. C. Baird, Gus Chenowth, Jim Dunaway, John Kinney, Elbert Hanks and Boyd White, and Eddie Aten. Within these pages the reader will meet a nineteen-year-old Texas Ranger figuratively dying to shoot his gun. He does get to shoot at people, but soon realizes what he thought was a bargain exacted a steep price. Another tale is of an old-school cowman who shut down illicit traffic in stolen livestock that had existed for years on the Llano Estacado. He was tough, salty, and had no quarter for cow-thieves or sympathy for any mealy-mouthed politicians. He cleaned house, maybe not too nicely, but unarguably successful he was. Then there is the tale of an accomplished and unbeaten fugitive, well known and identified for murder of a Texas peace officer. But the Texas Rangers couldn't find him. County sheriffs wouldn't hold him. Slipping away from bounty hunters, he hit Owlhoot Trail.

This thoroughly researched and vivid account examines a murderous spree by one of the West’s most notorious outlaw gangs and the consequences for a small Mormon community in Arizona’s White Mountains. On March 27, 1900, Frank LeSueur and Gus Gibbons joined a sheriff’s posse to track and arrest five suspected outlaws. The next day, LeSueur and Gibbons, who had become separated from other posse members, were found brutally murdered. The outlaws belonged to Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch gang. Frank LeSueur was the great uncle of the book’s author, Stephen C. LeSueur. In writing about the Wild Bunch, historians have played up the outlaws’ daring heists and violent confrontations. Their victims serve primarily as extras in the gang’s stories, bit players and forgotten names whose lives merit little attention. Drawing upon journals, reminiscences, newspaper articles, and other source materials, LeSueur examines this episode from the victims’ perspective. Popular culture often portrays outlaws as misunderstood and even honorable men—Robin Hood figures—but as this history makes clear, they were stone-cold killers who preferred ambush over direct confrontation. They had no qualms about shooting people in the back. The LeSueur and Gibbons families that settled St. Johns, Arizona, served as part of a colonizing vanguard for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, popularly known as Mormons. They contended with hostile neighbors, an unforgiving environment, and outlaw bands that took advantage of the large mountain expanses to hide and escape justice. Deprivation and death were no strangers to the St. Johns colonizers, but the LeSueur-Gibbons murders shook the entire community, the act being so vicious and unnecessary, the young men so full of promise. By focusing the historian’s lens on this incident and its aftermath, this exciting Western history offers fresh insights into the Wild Bunch gang, while also shedding new light on the Mormon colonizing experience in a gripping tale of life and death on the Arizona frontier. Praise for Life and Death on the Mormon Frontier: "Stephen LeSueur takes the reader on a ride into the dark, murderous world of the Wild Bunch in the Mormon settlements of the Utah-Arizona frontier. A compelling, deeply researched, and well-written study that will grab the attention of Old West historians." — Daniel Buck, co-author of The End of the Road: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in Bolivia "Stephen LeSueur unearths the circumstances that led a gang of outlaws to kill Frank LeSueur (the author’s great-uncle) and Gus Gibbons near St. Johns, Arizona, in 1900. LeSueur punctures popular myths about the Wild Bunch, but the true history of poverty, faithfulness, criminality, and family is more compelling and just as wild. It's a hard book to put down." — John G. Turner, author of Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet "Unlike romanticized versions of Western bandits, Life and Death on the Mormon Frontier portrays a grittier, authentic Old West in a manner that draws the reader into another era. As a descendant of one of the many victims of Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch, LeSueur thoroughly and compellingly recounts the murder and its devastating effect on the family—something often overlooked. In the current climate of winking at contemporary scofflaws, it is good to be reminded that character still counts—and that its opposite still destroys.” — Gregory A. Prince, author of David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism and Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History

Being an outlaw in the Old West was a dangerous, grisly business—twenty-three gunshot wounds and living to tell the tale, falling out of a moving train, decapitation due to a hanging gone wrong, life on the lam, horse thievery, illegal alcohol trade, and more. This new volume collects two long out-of-print classic works—The Dalton Brothers and Their Astounding Career of Crime (first published in 1892 featuring “numerous illustrations reproduced from photographs taken on the spot”), about the incredible criminal exploits of the Dalton Gang as told by an anonymous “Eye Witness,” and Black Jack Ketchum: Last of the Hold Up Kings (first published in 1955), about Thomas Edward “Black Jack” Ketchum of the infamous Hole-in-the-Wall Gang as told by Ed Bartholomew. These notorious outlaws of the Old West gained their infamy robbing trains, and all, except for one, died as violently as they lived—two of the Daltons during a bank robbery in 1892, a third in 1894, and Black Jack Ketchum in 1901 by hanging. These two classic accounts are brought together for the first time in this paperback collection of colorful stories about the two gangs. This is a must-read for anyone interested in the true stories of the Old West and nineteenth-century criminals.

Soft-spoken, cheerful, handsome, and well dressed, George West Musgrave “looked more like a senator than a cattle rustler.” Yet he was a cattle rustler as well as a bandit, robber, and killer, “guilty of more crimes than Billy the Kid was ever accused of.” In Last of the Old-Time Outlaws, Karen Holliday Tanner and John D. Tanner, Jr., recount the colorful life of Musgrave (1877-1947), enduring badman of the American Southwest. Musgrave was a charter member of the High Five/Black Jack gang, which was responsible for Arizona’s first bank hold-up, numerous post office and stagecoach robberies, and the largest Santa Fe Railroad heist in history. Following a decade-long hunt, he was captured and acquitted of killing a former Texas Ranger. After this near brush with prison or execution, he headed for South America, where he gained fame as the leading Gringo rustler. It wasn’t until the 1940s that Musgrave’s age and poor health brought an end to a criminal career that had spanned two continents and two centuries. Incorporating previously unknown facts about the career of this frontier outlaw, the Tanners thoroughly document Musgrave’s half-century of crime, from his childhood in the Texas brush country to his final days in Paraguay.

Becky Lyndell died while investigating the Bear Track Fire. Her death was no accident, even though the murderer intended for it to look that way. Aaron Waters is the primary suspect, but he is supposed to be in prison – has he escaped or does he have an accomplice? Becky’s Uncle, Fire Investigator Randy Banister, teams up with Police Officer Mike Evans to catch the killer. The suspense carries throughout the story until the very end… This book includes a preview of Banister – The New World, starting the Banister adventure in the year 1744. The Fire Killer is dedicated to emergency personnel everywhere, and especially to the Granite Mountain Hot Shots who gave their lives protecting the lives and property of others on June 30th, 2013.

The Ben Lilly Legend brings back to life a great American hunter—the greatest bear hunter in history after Davy Crockett, by his own account and also by the record. Here are all the stories Ben Lilly told and a great many more Frank Dobie heard about him, put together in a fresh and fascinating contribution to American folklore.