**Winner of the 2021 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards (History, Other)** Lawman or Outlaw? At times, the black-hatted “villains” and white-hatted “good guys” of the Old West were one and the same. Often it was difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish who was who. Sheriff Wyatt Earp stole horses and ran brothels. Albuquerque’s first town marshal, Milton Yarberry, was accused of murder and subsequently “jerked to Jesus.” Burt Alvord, town marshal of Willcox, Arizona, and friends, robbed a train. Alvord then deputized these same friends into a posse to apprehend the robbers. It came as no surprise when his posse came up empty handed. Justice Hoodoo Brown and Deputy JJ Webb ruled Las Vegas as leaders of the Dodge City Gang until they were run out of town by citizens fed up with their type of justice. “Mysterious” Dave Mather and even two of the Dalton Gang spent time behind a badge, as well as behind bars. When Outlaws Wore Badges explores the double lives of outlaw lawmen through some of the West’s most memorable frontier characters.

Lawman or outlaw? Black-hatted "villains" and white-hatted "good guys" of the Old West walk the streets of our imagination. Hollywood draws a convenient line in the Western dirt, differentiating between the two. But in reality, at times it was difficult, if not impossible to distinguish who was who. Shadowy faces roamed the West. When Outlaws Wore Badges explores the world of lawman and outlaw wrapped into one person. At times the badge speaks, other times--the gun. Living in the Old West was not easy. Often, law and justice were left behind in the east, when men migrated to the open lands of the West. Some men took advantage of fluid regulations while others found themselves helping to invent and enforce law and order. A few men did both.

Many stories have been written about the exploits of Billy the Kid, the charismatic outlaw of the Old West. Some have been pure fiction, designed to entertain and excite. Purple prose writers began chronicling the exploits of Billy as early as the late 1870s. Others have been biographical, researched by historians or recorded by those who knew him, including his murderer, Sheriff Pat Garrett. But there was once a different side to the famous gunfighter, a softer more artistic side that seems at odds with Billy’s reputation for shooting, killing, and robbing. Born Henry McCarty, he was also known by the names Henry Antrim, Kid Antrim, and William H. Bonney. He didn’t shoot twenty-one men, as has been claimed. Four is a more likely number, three in self-defense. In Before Billy the Kid, author Melody Groves explores the early life of the infamous outlaw, the teenage boy who loved to sing and dance. The young man who was polite, educated, and popular. A boy who had the bad luck to be orphaned at fifteen and left with no one to guide him through life. How different history might have been if Billy had pursued his love of music instead of a life of crime.

Gold fever hits Andrew Jackson Colton. Hard. At eighteen, the opportunity to acquire wealth calls to him. In August 1863, Andy rides into Birchville, the southwestern New Mexico Black Range town, headquarters for anything gold. Andy claims a spot along the stream and pans for gold. Unsuccessful, by first snowfall he’s ready to go home, try again when it’s warmer. However, friend Thomas O’Malley convinces Andy to join him—head farther into the Range to the mining berg of Mogollon. Andy encounters Apaches and is wounded, O’Malley killed. Andy stumbles into Mogollon, which has already been raided. He locates the single cabin occupied by a runaway slave, Dawson, who saves his life. Dawson forces Andy to work, and then hides him when Andy’s older brothers come looking. Dawson convinces the Apache to buy Andy, but the Apache keep Dawson and Andy as slaves. The Apache leader uses Andy as a lure for Andy’s brothers. The leader’s only objective: revenge for his brother’s death at the hands of James Colton. Still looking for Andy, the Colton brothers ride into Birchville, raided by the Apache. Andy and Dawson are used as bait and the Coltons take it. Everyone fights for their lives.

Brian Behnken offers a sweeping examination of the interactions between Mexican-origin people and law enforcement—both legally codified police agencies and extralegal justice—across the U.S. Southwest (especially Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas) from the 1830s to the 1930s. Representing a broad, colonial regime, police agencies and extralegal groups policed and controlled Mexican-origin people to maintain state and racial power in the region, treating Mexicans and Mexican Americans as a "foreign" population that they deemed suspect and undesirable. White Americans justified these perceptions and the acts of violence that they spawned with racist assumptions about the criminality of Mexican-origin people, but Behnken details the many ways Mexicans and Mexican Americans responded to violence, including the formation of self-defense groups and advocacy organizations. Others became police officers, vowing to protect Mexican-origin people from within the ranks of law enforcement. Mexican Americans also pushed state and territorial governments to professionalize law enforcement to halt abuse. The long history of the border region between the United States and Mexico has been one marked by periodic violence, but Behnken shows us in unsparing detail how Mexicans and Mexican Americans refused to stand idly by in the face of relentless assault.

She left home at nineteen to prove to her father, and other men, that she could do anything a man could do, and better. And she did. For three years, Skye-Blue Johnston has bounty hunted alongside her friend Clyde Daniels. She has brought in more outlaws than to be expected of a woman, and has made a living off it. Clyde and Blue (as she liked to be called) rode together until his death by an outlaw she and Clyde had been after. Blue had been devastated after his death, and took off on her own to the town of Silver City, Missouri. He was the famed outlaw, the Robin Hood of Liberty, Missouri. And he had the most feared gang of the west. For many years, Jesse James and his gang has terrorized banks, stagecoaches, and trains in the surrounding states of Missouri as a lifestyle. He has known loss, and has become a hard man for it. Having met the bounty hunter of Silver City in the Calico Saloon, his (along with his brother, Frank's and his cousin, Cole's) life is about to change. When these two forces meet, sparks fly and an electrifying bond is born. Throughout their obstacles, and meeting Billy the Kid and Johnny Ringo, they become inseparable. The outlaw and bounty hunter beat the odds that are against them and find out in the end that Love is the Ultimate Outlaw.

Amid the backdrop of World War II, race riots, and police corruption, a white police officer in Phoenix, Arizona, guns down an on-duty, black cop from his same department. The communitys residents pick sides, and while the second trial ends in an acquittal, the battle isnt over. The detective, Frenchy Navarre, returns to duty but is shot dead when he encounters Officer Joe Davis, the slain officers partner. This is just one of the fascinating tales told by Gordon A. Hunsaker, who also recalls: Surviving his youth on the streets of Los Angeles Fighting in the jungles of Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War A series of stories that cops normally only tell each other Piloting helicopters and airplanes while on the job Battling his toughest opponent cancer And much more! This compilation of musings, observations, and police lore is insightful, thought- provoking and, at times, just darn spooky. Any Arizona resident, law enforcement officer or lover of history will be thrilled to enter the exciting world of Gunfights & Gunfighters.

Joseph G. Rosa's vivid and expertly written tale of this violent time combines contemporary accounts with meticulous historical research and an unjaundiced appraisal of the facts. Telling the story of every major gunfighter, peace officer, and outlaw of the West, Rosa places them within the context of a violent frontier and the coming of law and order. Complementing the text are twenty-seven outstanding color spreads featuring firearms from the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum (Los Angeles) and the Buffalo Bill Historical Center (Cody). Many of the spreads contain guns owned and used by such well-known individuals as Pat Garrett, Billy the Kid, Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickok, John Wesley Hardin, Frank James, and Harvey Logan.

When Sheriff Heath Royal seeks relief for his tormented conscience by attending church services for the first time since his youth, he is beckoned to an empty seat by the wealthy, recently widowed Rebekka Korhenen Brando, and both are immediately, although unwittingly, stirred by an unintentional rekindling of the feelings that almost led to a marriage between them twenty-five years earlier. Gossipy church members and malicious tongue waggers from the small community of Shady Spring, Texas, watch in amusement and sometimes in horror as the former lovers struggle through a series of challenges and near-death experiences to determine whether the forces of evil or the roundabout intervention of God Himself will allow them a life together. Standing in their way is a demented ranch foreman convinced that he and Rebekka are destined for each other. Heath’s dubious future as a lawman, and grudge-bearing outlaws who want to put the sheriff into his grave. The solutions may be divined under the sheltering limbs of a magnificent old oak tree where Heath and Rebekka seek solace and open their hearts to each other.

Standoffs, saloons, and sunsets spring to mind when one envisions the rough and tumble early days of the American frontier.