From its founding in the early 1830s, Springfield was a rough frontier town where whiskey flowed freely, gunplay and fistfights abounded and gambling thrived. The Civil War not only brought the horror of warfare home to Springfield but also introduced worldly vices like prostitution that were scarcely known in previous years. Yet throughout its history, Springfield has managed to maintain a veneer of respectability not shared by certain other towns of southwest Missouri that were founded as wild, wide-open mining camps, like Joplin and Granby. Join Larry Wood as he digs beneath the surface of Queen City history to expose notorious characters and capers that would make even Joplinites blush.

True stories of Ma Barker, Belle Starr, Bonnie Parker, and other historical female desperadoes of the Midwest . . . Includes photos. Marauders like Jesse James and the Younger gang earned Missouri the title of “Outlaw State,” but the male desperadoes had nothing on their female counterparts . . . Belle “Queen of the Bandits” Starr and Cora Hubbard kept Missouri’s sensationalist newspapers and dime novelists in business with exploits ranging from horse thefts to bank heists. Missouri native Ma Barker and her murderous sons rose to infamy during the gangster era of the 1930s, while Bonnie Parker crisscrossed the state with Clyde Barrow. From savvy burlesque dancers to deadly gold diggers, historian Larry Wood chronicles the titillating stories of ten of the Show-Me State’s shadiest ladies.

Tracing Route 66 through Missouri represents one of America's favorite exercises in nostalgia, but a discerning glance among the roadside weeds reveals the kind of sordid history that doesn't appear on postcards. Along with vintage cars and picnic baskets, Route 66 was a conduit humming with contraband and crackling with the gunplay of folks like Bonnie and Clyde, Jesse James and the Young brothers. It was also the preferred byway of lynch mobs, murderous hitchhikers and mad scientists. Stop in at places like the Devil's Elbow and the Steffleback Bordello on this trip through the more treacherous twists of the Mother Road.

Watch a duel on Bloody Island from the stern of a river pirate's ship and be glad that Abraham Lincoln did not have to keep his appointment. Venture into a brothel where a madam's grin was filled with diamonds or where "Ta Ra Ra Boom de Ay" was hummed for the first time. Witness children forced into labor and aristocrats driven to suicide. Keep company with the gangsters who were a little too "cuckoo" for Al Capone. Visit Wicked St. Louis.

In the twenty-four years that Abraham Lincoln lived in Springfield, the city saw its share of crime, corruption and scandal, much of it at the hands of Lincoln's law clients and acquaintances. Erika Holst sheds light on these shady characters, from the man being sued for divorce who claimed that he caught his venereal disease from an outhouse to Governor William Bissell, whose near duel with Jefferson Davis almost made him ineligible to hold office. Learn what prompted a congressional candidate- in an election clerked by Lincoln- to shout down his accuser as some 'spindle-shanked, toad-eating, man-granny, who feeds the depraved appetites of his patrons with gossip and slander.' Read the true stories that fed those depraved appetites, drawn from the newspapers Lincoln read and the docket where he practiced law. In these pages, discover the wicked side of Lincoln's Springfield.

Desperadoes like Frank and Jesse James earned Missouri the nickname of the "Outlaw State" after the Civil War, and that reputation followed the region into the Prohibition era through the feverish criminal activity of Bonnie and Clyde, the Barkers and Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd. Duck into the Slicker War of the 1840s, a vigilante movement that devolved into a lingering feud in which the two sides sometimes meted out whippings, called slickings, on each other. Or witness the Kansas City Massacre of 1933, a shootout between law enforcement officers and criminal gang members who were trying to free Frank Nash, a notorious gang leader being escorted to federal prison. Follow Larry Wood through the most shameful and savage portion of the Show-Me State's history.

Early Wichita earned a wicked reputation from newspapers across Kansas thanks to a bevy of madams and murderers, bootleggers and bank robbers, con men and crooked cops. Gambler and saloonkeeper "Rowdy Joe" Lowe was the toast of the town before shooting down his rival, "Red" Beard, and skipping town. Robber and cop killer "Clever Eddie" Adams spread a wave of terror until the police evened the score. Dixie Lee ran the city's classiest brothel with little interference from authorities. Notorious quack "Professor" H. Samuels made a fortune selling worthless eye drops. And county attorney Willard Boone was chased out of town when he was caught with his hand in the bootlegger's cookie jar. Local author Joe Stumpe tells the real stories of the city's best-known and least-known criminals and misfits.

Branson's wholesome brand of entertainment made it the nation's destination for family fun, but the vacation wonderland can't claim a spotless past. Murder and mischief dogged the town's efforts at respectability from the very beginning. The founder's own brother, Galba Branson, was a prominent member of the notorious vigilante gang the Bald Knobbers. He died in a picnic shootout that originated in a church prank. Branson's transformation into a showbiz mecca brought quarrel and scandal in its wake, from provoked orangutans to wire-tapped dressing rooms. Three comedians and authors--Ed and Karen Underwood and John Pinney--offer this backstage pass to the seamier side of Branson's history.

Kansans like to think of their state as a land of industrious, law-abiding and friendly people, and for the most part they are correct. But its history has many tales of murders, cons, extrajudicial killings and other crimes. Its restive frontier attracted menacing characters, such as a cowboy who murdered a man for snoring, the serial-killing Bender family and the train-robbing James-Younger Gang. Although the area was eventually settled, the scandals did not cease. Learn about how a quack doctor nearly won the governorship, a decommissioned nuclear missile silo housed the largest LSD manufacturing operation in American history and more. Author Adrian Zink explores the salacious side of Kansas history in these wild and degenerate stories.

Tacoma, the city where the rails meet the sails, has always been a place of innovation and rule-breakers. When the railroad came in the nineteenth century, business boomed, along with smuggling, bootlegging and prostitution. Men such as Peter Sandberg walked the line between criminal and respectable. Police in the growing town had their hands full not just with human criminals, but with stray cows, ducks and the occasional bear. Rumor has it that in the 1920s, gangsters Lucky Luciano and Frank Nitti were sent to cool their heels in the port city and may have been behind a smoke bomb attack on a movie theater. Join author Karla Stover as she delves into the wild and colorful past of the City of Destiny.