Barnett lived in the twentieth century but carried with him many of the attitudes of old frontier Texas. His penchant to settle a score with gunplay brought him into confrontation with Sheriff W. Graham barnett was killed in Rankin, on December 6, Texas, 1931. In real life he was a good cowboy, who provided for his family the best way he could, and who did so by slipping seamlessly between the law enforcement community and the world of illegal liquor traffickers.

Among those beliefs was that if there were problems, a man dealt with them directly and forcefully—with a gun. One contemporary summed it up best: “Officers in West Texas got the best sleep they had had in twenty years that Sunday night after Fowler killed Graham. ”. C. Stories say he killed unnumbered men on the border, but he stood trial only twice and was acquitted both times.

Fowler, a former friend, who shot Barnett with the latter’s own submachine gun on loan. His death brought an end to a storied career, a texas ranger known for questionable shootings in Company B under Captain Fox, a bootlegger, but not an end to the legends that claimed he was a gunman, a deputy sheriff, a hired pistolero on both sides of the border, and a possible “fixer” for both law enforcement and outlaw organizations.

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Death on the Lonely Llano Estacado: The Assassination of J. W. Jarrott, a Forgotten Hero A.C. Greene Series

What emerges from these pages is the strength of intriguing characters in an engrossing narrative: Jim Jarrott, the diminutive advocate who fearlessly champions the cause of the little guy. But frontier cattlemen who had been pasturing their herds on the unfenced prairie land were enraged by the encroachment of these “nesters.

In august 1902 a famous hired assassin, Jim Miller, ambushed and murdered J. W. In the winter of 1901, James W. Jarrott led a band of twenty-five homesteader families toward the Llano Estacado in far West Texas, newly opened for settlement by a populist Texas legislature. And finally jarrott’s young widow Mollie, who perseveres and prospers against great odds and tells the settlers to “Stay put!”.

Jarrott. The ruthless assassin, Deacon Jim Miller. Award-winning author bill neal investigates this cold case and successfully pieces together all the threads of circumstantial evidence to fit the noose snugly around the neck of Jim Miller’s employer. Who hired miller? This crime has never been solved, until now.

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The Last Sheriff in Texas: A True Tale of Violence and the Vote

Time magazine’s full-page article on the shooting was seen by some as a referendum on law enforcement owing to the sheriff’s extreme violence, but supportive telegrams from all across America poured into Beeville’s tiny post office. Barnhart confronted ennis in the election of 1952: a landmark standoff between old Texas, with its culture of cowboy bravery and violence, with its lawyers, and urban Texas, oil institutions, and a growing Mexican population.

The last sheriff in texas is a riveting narrative about the postwar American landscape, an era grappling with the same issues we continue to face today. The last sheriff in Texas would be an amazing allegory for our times, were it fiction. Ennis managed to draw his gun and put three bullets in each assailant; he reloaded and shot them three times more.

The town would never be the same again. Yet when a second violent incident threw ennis into the crosshairs of public opinion once again, the uprising was orchestrated by an unlikely figure: his close friend and Beeville’s favorite son, Johnny Barnhart. Debate over excessive force in law enforcement, gun control, the influence of the media, urban-rural conflict, Anglo-Mexican relations, the power of the oil industry, mistrust of politicians and the political process―all have surprising historical precedence in the story of Vail Ennis and Johnny Barnhart.

Instead it suggests cultural trenches that we view as new that were dug decades ago. Houston chronicle beeville, texas, a place of good schools, was the most American of small towns―the place that GIs had fantasized about while fighting through the ruins of Europe, clean streets, and churches. Old west justice ruled, point-blank, as evidenced by a 1947 shootout when outlaws surprised popular sheriff Vail Ennis at a gas station and shot him five times, in the belly.

Mountain Man: John Colter, the Lewis & Clark Expedition, and the Call of the American West American Grit

Expedition to traverse the North American continent. Along the way, he charted some of the West's most treasured landmarks. Historian David W. These books focus on the trials of remarkable individuals with an emphasis on rich primary source material and artwork. 50 b&w photographs Countryman. The extraordinary life of lewis & clark's right-hand manIn 1804, John Colter set out with Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on the first U.

S. During the twenty-eight month ordeal, Colter served as a hunter and scout, and honed his survival skills on the western frontier. Marshall crafts this captivating history from colter's primary sources, built a fire, and experiencing firsthand how he and his contemporaries survived in the wilderness how they pitched a shelter, hearing what he heard, and has retraced Colter's steps―seeing what he saw, followed a trail, and forded a stream―adding a powerful layer of authority and detail.

The american grit series brings you true tales of endurance, survival, and ingenuity from the annals of American history. But when the journey was over, Colter stayed behind, spending four more years trekking alone through dangerous and unfamiliar territory.

Texas Blood: Seven Generations Among the Outlaws, Ranchers, Indians, Missionaries, Soldiers, and Smugglers of the Borderlands

Knopf. Hodge's ranching family. Here is an unsentimental, punishing, keenly insightful attempt to grapple with all that makes Texas so magical, and polarizing. In the tradition of ian frazier's great plains, an intoxicating, and as vivid as the work of Cormac McCarthy, singularly illuminating history of the Texas borderlands from their settlement through seven generations of Roger D.

And here is a contemplation of what it means that the ranching industry that has sustained families like Hodge's for almost two centuries is quickly fading away, taking with it a part of our larger, deep-rooted cultural inheritance. Countryman. What brought the author's family to texas? what is it about texas that for centuries has exerted a powerful allure for adventurers and scoundrels, dreamers and desperate souls, outlaws and outliers? In search of answers, Hodge travels across his home state--which he loves and hates in shifting measure--tracing the wanderings of his ancestors into forgotten histories along vanished roads.

Here is a spellbindingly evocative portrait of the borderlands--with its brutal history of colonization, conquest, and genocide; where stories of death and drugs and desperation play out daily. A wholly original fusion of memoir and history--as piercing as it is elegiac--Texas Blood is a triumph.

Cattle Kingdom: The Hidden History of the Cowboy West

Eamon dolan. Countryman. A revolutionary new appraisal of the Old West and the America it made The open range cattle era lasted barely a quarter-century, but it left America irrevocably changed. Cattle kingdom is a revelatory new view of the Old West. Yet this extraordinary time and its import have remained unexamined for decades.

Cattle kingdom reveals the truth of how the West rose and fell, and how its legacy defines us today. We meet a diverse array of players—from the expert cowboy Teddy Blue to the failed rancher and future president Teddy Roosevelt. The tale takes us from dust-choked cattle drives to the unlikely splendors of boomtowns like Abilene, and Cheyenne, Kansas, Wyoming.

Knopf. Knowlton shows us how they and others like them could achieve so many outsized feats: killing millions of bison in a decade, driving cattle by the thousand, building the first opera house on the open range, and much more. These few decades following the civil War brought America its greatest boom-and-bust cycle until the Depression, the invention of the assembly line, and the dawn of the conservation movement.

It inspired legends, such as that icon of rugged individualism, the cowboy. We venture from the Texas Panhandle to the Dakota Badlands to the Chicago stockyards.

The Illustrated Life and Times of Wild Bill Hickok

The "prince of pistoleers" meets the "prince of western history" in this much anticipated new book from Bob Boze Bell-chock full of the great art, authoritative history, rare photos, and that unique dose of Boze whimsy that we have come to expect. Knopf. Eamon dolan. More fun than any history book should be and a must have addition to every Western collection.

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Lincoln County And Its Wars

Eamon dolan. Countryman. Knopf. New meticulously detailed history of the Lincoln County Wars and the men who fought them.

No Hope for Heaven, No Fear of Hell: The Stafford-Townsend Feud of Colorado County, Texas, 1871-1911 Texas Local Series

Elected office was one of the paths to success, but more important was control of the sheriff’s office, which gave one a decided advantage should the threat of gun violence arise. No hope for heaven, no fear of Hell concentrates on those individual acts of private justice associated with the Stafford and Townsend families.

Knopf. Two family names have come to be associated with the violence that plagued Colorado County, Texas, for decades after the end of the Civil War: the Townsends and the Staffords. The second phase blossomed after 1898 with the assassination of Larkin Hope, and Will Clements, Jim Townsend, and concluded in 1911 with the violent deaths of Marion Hope, all in the space of one month.

Countryman. Both prominent families amassed wealth and achieved status, but it was their resolve to hold on to both, by whatever means necessary, including extra-legal means, that sparked the feud. Eamon dolan. It began with an 1871 shootout in Columbus, followed by the deaths of the Stafford brothers in 1890

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Tom Jeffords: Friend of Cochise

Knopf. In his search for the real story of jeffords, and the parts they played in mid-nineteenth century American history and politics, Cochise, author Doug Hocking reveals that while the myths surrounding those events may have clouded the truth a bit, Jeffords was almost as brave and impressive as the legend had it.

Countryman. The first full-length biography of the Western legend Tom Jeffords, immortalized by Jimmy Stewart in 1950’s Broken Arrow. This book tells the true story of a man who headed west drawn by the lure of the pike’s Peak Gold Rush in 1858; made a life for himself over a decade as he scouted for the army, prospected, became a business man; then learned the Apache language and rode alone into Cochise’s camp in order to negotiate peaceful passage for his stagecoach company.

Eamon dolan.

Man-Hunters of the Old West

To create a semblance of order, freelance enforcers of the law known as man-hunters undertook the search for fugitives. Settlers in the frontier West were often easy prey for criminals. Dearment’s detailed account of their careers redeems their reputations and reveals the truth behind their fascinating legends.

As dearment shows, man-hunters were far more likely to capture felons alive than their popular image suggests. Man-hunters also came from a variety of backgrounds in the East and the West: of the eight men whose stories DeArment tells, one began as an officer for an express company, and another was the head of an organization of local lawmen.

They also crossed paths with famous criminals and sheriffs, Butch Cassidy, from John Wesley Hardin and Sam Bass to Wyatt Earp, and the Sundance Kid. Eamon dolan. Telling the true stories of famous men who risked their lives to bring western outlaws to justice, Man-Hunters of the Old West dispels long-held myths of their cold-blooded vigilantism and brings fresh nuance to the lives and legends that made the West wild.

All were tough survivors, snakebites, disease, buffalo stampedes, living through gunshot wounds, and every other hazard of life in the Wild West. Robert K. Policing efforts were scattered at best and often amounted to vigilante retaliation. Knopf.