Authoritative guide to everything in print about lawmen and the lawless—from Billy the Kid to the painted ladies of frontier cow towns. Nearly 2,500 entries, taken from newspapers, court records, and more.

Buffalo Bill lives deep in American legend. A Kansas-bred farm boy, he went on to become a renowned trapper and hunter, army scout, Indian fighter, and finally a world showman and celebrity. As a man of the Wild West, he became known as a larger-than-life buffalo hunter. As an army scout, he earned the Medal of Honor for gallantry in action. But Bill was unsatisfied. Setting his sights higher yet, he traveled the country performing in Wild West stage shows, and eventually founded “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West,” a terrifically successful traveling production depicting cowboy and Indian life on the plains. Bill’s show earned him large sums of money and drove him to intense national prominence at the turn of the century. This is his story in his own words.

Reproduction of the original.

Last of the Great Scouts is a biography of William F. Cody a.k.a Buffalo Bill, written by his sister Helen Cody Wetmore. Buffalo Bill was of the most famous and well-known figures of the American Old West. His legend began to spread when he was only 23. Shortly thereafter he started performing in shows that displayed cowboy themes and episodes from the frontier and Indian Wars. In authors words the reason for writing this biography were twofold. Primarily, her intention was to provide an authentic biography of her brother in response to many books of varying value that have been published. The second reason was purely personal. Helen wanted to share with readers who Bill was personally and to present his true personality. _x000D_ Contents:_x000D_ The Old Homestead in Iowa_x000D_ Will's First Indian_x000D_ The Shadow of Partisan Strife_x000D_ Persecution Continues_x000D_ The "Boy Extra"_x000D_ Family Defender and Household Tease_x000D_ Indian Encounter and School-day Incidents_x000D_ Death and Burial of Turk_x000D_ Will as Pony Express Rider_x000D_ Echoes From Sumter_x000D_ A Short but Dashing Indian Campaign_x000D_ The Mother's Last Illness_x000D_ In the Secret-service_x000D_ Will as a Benedict_x000D_ How the Sobriquet of "Buffalo Bill" Was Won_x000D_ Satanta, Chief of the Kiowas_x000D_ Will Made Chief of Scouts_x000D_ Army Life at Fort M'pherson_x000D_ Pa-has-ka, the Long-haired Chief_x000D_ The Hunt of the Grand Duke Alexis_x000D_ Theatrical Experiences_x000D_ The Government's Indian Policy_x000D_ Literary Work_x000D_ First Visit to the Valley of the Big Horn_x000D_ Tour of Great Britain_x000D_ Return of the "Wild West" to America_x000D_ A Tribute to General Miles_x000D_ The "Wild West" at the World's Fair_x000D_ Cody Day at the Omaha Exposition_x000D_ The Last of the Great Scouts

Everyone knows the name Calamity Jane. Scores of dime novels and movie and TV Westerns have portrayed this original Wild West woman as an adventuresome, gun-toting hellion. Although Calamity Jane has probably been written about more than any other woman of the nineteenth-century American West, fiction and legend have largely obscured the facts of her life. This lively, concise, and exhaustively researched biography traces the real person from the Missouri farm where she was born in 1856 through the development of her notorious persona as a Wild West heroine. Before Calamity Jane became a legend, she was Martha Canary, orphaned when she was only eleven years old. From a young age she traveled fearlessly, worked with men, smoked, chewed tobacco, and drank. By the time she arrived in the boomtown of Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1876, she had become Calamity Jane, and the real Martha Canary had disappeared under a landslide of purple prose. Calamity became a hostess and dancer in Deadwood’s saloons and theaters. She imbibed heavily, and she might have been a prostitute, but she had other qualities, as well, including those of an angel of mercy who ministered to the sick and the down-and-out. Journalists and dime novelists couldn’t get enough of either version, nor, in the following century, could filmmakers. Sorting through the stories, veteran western historian Richard W. Etulain’s account begins with a biography that offers new information on Calamity’s several “husbands” (including one she legally married), her two children, and a woman who claimed to be the daughter of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity, a story Etulain discredits. In the second half of the book, Etulain traces the stories that have shaped Calamity Jane’s reputation. Some Calamity portraits, he says, suggest that she aspired to a quiet life with a husband and family. As the 2004–2006 HBO series Deadwood makes clear, well more than a century after her first appearance as a heroine in the Deadwood Dick dime novels, Calamity Jane lives on—raunchy, unabashed, contradictory, and ambiguous as ever.

Buffalo Bill Cody's life, in fact and fiction, was shaped like a classical tragedy etched across the western prairies. More dime novels were written about him than any other western character, and he mythologized himself as hero of his Wild West Show. Popular media so twisted the facts of his life that the historic William Cody and his real accomplishments have almost been lost. Like the West itself, the man was a product of the long legacy of romantic thought about the frontier. To rediscover the historic Cody, author Eric Sorg has researched primary material scattered in museums and libraries around the country, sifting the historical Cody from the commercial creation.

To examine the social and cultural significance of the athlete hero in American literature, Robert J. Higgs turns to the works of Ring Lardner, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams. Higgs views the athlete in literature not as an artistic creation but as one who reflects the tastes, attainments, beliefs, and ideals of his society. The athletes he describes as Apollonian are the know-it-alls, of whom Lardner's Busher Keefe is an example; the Dyonisian, as exemplified by Irwin Shaw's Christian Darling, worships his body as an end in itself. The Adonic seeks knowledge for the sake of self-realization and lives in a world of tension, pain, struggle, and hope. Such a figure is Wolfe's Nebraska Crane. Higgs finds in contemporary American literature a clear rejection of the Apollonian and Dyonisian models and an acceptance of the Adonic.

The Pony Express has a hold on the American imagination wildly out of proportion to its actual role in the history of the West. The system of transporting mail to California by a relay of lone riders on swift horses ran less than eighteen months in 1860-1861 and failed by every measure of success. Nevertheless, it has become the most iconic symbol of the West. Scott Alumbaugh was so taken with the Pony Express that at age 62 he bikepacked 1,400 miles of the trail from St. Joseph, Missouri to Salt Lake City, Utah. Alumbaugh’s journey took five weeks on a route that was mostly off-road, sometimes through remote territory. Along the way he came to see the celebrated Pony Express as a collection of fables based on a few historical facts and reshaped into a symbol of the spirit that “won the West.” On The Pony Express Trail: One Man’s Bikepacking Journey to Discover History from a Different Kind of Saddle recounts Scott Alumbaugh’s experience bikepacking the Pony Express Trail during the summer of 2021. The narrative follows his day-to-day experiences and impressions—the challenges, the sites he visited, the country he rode through, and the interactions with the people he met—while taking a fresh look at the real Pony Express in the context of mid-1800s historical events along the trail: The Mexican-American, Utah, and Paiute Wars; the California and Pike’s Peak gold rushes; the overland emigration of hundreds of thousands to Oregon and California; the exodus of tens of thousands of Mormons to Utah; and the increasingly contentious fight over slavery along with the looming threat of civil war.