The Old West was coming to an end. Two legendary outlaws refused to go with it. As leaders of the Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid executed the most daring bank and train robberies of their day. For several years at the end of the 1890s, the two friends, along with a revolving band of thieves, eluded law enforcement while stealing from the rich bankers and Eastern railroad corporations who exploited Western land…until they rode headlong into the twentieth century. In The Last Outlaws, Thom Hatch brings these memorable characters to life like never before. From their early holdup attempts to that fateful day in Bolivia, Hatch draws on a wealth of fresh research to go beyond the myth and provide a compelling new look at these legends of the Wild West. Includes Photographs

Thus spoke one lawman about John Wesley Hardin, easily the most feared and fearless of all the gunfighters in the West. Nobody knows the exact number of his victims-perhaps as few as twenty or as many as fifty. In his way of thinking, Hardin never shot a man who did not deserve it. Seeking to gain insight into Hardin’s homicidal mind, Leon Metz describes how Hardin’s bloody career began in post-Civil War Central Texas, when lawlessness and killings were commonplace, and traces his life of violence until his capture and imprisonment in 1878. After numerous unsuccessful escape attempts, Hardin settled down and received a pardon years later in 1895. He wrote an autobiography but did not live to see it published. Within a few months of his release, John Selman gunned him down in an El Paso saloon.

This eBook collection is geared for history buffs who shy away from white knights and do-gooders. W. C. Jameson’s exploration of outlaws and criminals from the 20th century goes deep within the wrinkles of time, uncovering long-kept secrets, misinformed facts, and what became of these outlaws in the end. The set includes Butch Cassidy, John Wilkes Booth, and Billy the Kid.

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.

A union list of serials commencing publication after Dec. 31, 1949.

Marauding outlaws, or violent rebels still bent on fighting the Civil War? For decades, the so-called “Taylor-Sutton feud” has been seen as a bloody vendetta between two opposing gangs of Texas gunfighters. However, historian James M. Smallwood here shows that what seemed to be random lawlessness can be interpreted as a pattern of rebellion by a loose confederation of desperadoes who found common cause in their hatred of the Reconstruction government in Texas. Between the 1850s and 1880, almost 200 men rode at one time or another with Creed Taylor and his family through a forty-five-county area of Texas, stealing and killing almost at will, despite heated and often violent opposition from pro-Union law enforcement officials, often led by William Sutton. From 1871 until his eventual arrest, notorious outlaw John Wesley Hardin served as enforcer for the Taylors. In 1874 in the streets of Comanche, Texas, on his twenty-first birthday, Hardin and two other members of the Taylor ring gunned down Brown County Deputy Charlie Webb. This cold-blooded killing—one among many—marked the beginning of the end for the Taylor ring, and Hardin eventually went to the penitentiary as a result. The Feud That Wasn’t reinforces the interpretation that Reconstruction was actually just a continuation of the Civil War in another guise, a thesis Smallwood has advanced in other books and articles. He chronicles in vivid detail the cattle rustling, horse thieving, killing sprees, and attacks on law officials perpetrated by the loosely knit Taylor ring, drawing a composite picture of a group of anti-Reconstruction hoodlums who at various times banded together for criminal purposes. Western historians and those interested in gunfighters and lawmen will heartily enjoy this colorful and meticulously researched narrative.

This well-researched biography of the life—and controversial death—of Robert LeRoy Parker, a.k.a. Butch Cassidy, is a journey across the late-nineteenth-century American West as we follow Cassidy’s exploits in Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah, where he made his name as a surprisingly affable outlaw. More important, this book answers the question: Did Butch Cassidy, noted outlaw of the American West, survive his alleged death at the hands of Bolivian soldiers in 1908 and return to friends and family in the United States? The evidence suggesting he did is impressive and not easily dismissed, but how he lived and what identity he assumed are still debated.

This collection of fifty outlaw tales includes well-knowns such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Frank and Jesse James, Belle Starr (and her dad), and Pancho Villa, along with a fair smattering of women, organized crime bosses, smugglers, and of course the usual suspects: highwaymen, bank and train robbers, cattle rustlers, snake-oil salesmen, and horse thieves. Men like Henry Brown and Burt Alvord worked on both sides of the law either at different times of their lives or simultaneously. Clever shyster Soapy Smith and murderer Martin Couk survived by their wits, while the outlaw careers of the dimwitted DeAutremont brothers and bigmouthed Diamondfield Jack were severely limited by their intellect, or lack thereof. Nearly everyone in these pages was motivated by greed, revenge, or a lethal mixture of the two. The most bloodthirsty of the bunch, such as the heartless (and, some might argue, soulless) Annie Cook and trigger-happy Augustine Chacón, surely had evil written into their very DNA.