Malice in a Mining Mecca Pernicious activity tends to follow prosperity, and the heyday of the Cripple Creek mining district was no exception. Cripple Creek's first murder spilled out from a saloon in 1892. The 1894 heist at the Victor Hotel took place mere months after opening. Railroad superintendent Richard Newell was gunned down over a construction right of way dispute--a contentious, nationwide issue to this day. By 1893, the area was home to dancehall girls and prostitutes, including...

Throughout Teller County, history lovers can find abandoned towns and forgotten main streets that once bustled with life and commerce. Even before Teller was carved from surrounding counties, the scenic mountains and lucrative mines of the gold rush era brought thousands of settlers and attracted resort owners and tycoons eager to exploit the rich setting. Seemingly overnight, towns in the Cripple Creek District and other places popped up, flush with gold and people looking for opportunity...

For more than 140 years, the Hash Knife brand has intrigued Western history lovers. From its rough-and-ready-sounding name to its travels throughout Texas, Montana, and Arizona, the Hash Knife sports a romance like few others in the cattle industry. Several outfits have been proud to call the brand their own, and the stories behind the men who worked for these companies are the epitome of Western lore and truth combined. Beginning in 1884, the Hash Knife--owned by the Aztec Land and Cattle...

"Western prostitution historian Jan MacKell Collins tells the stories of the many 'horizontal experts' of Prescott." — True WestArizona remained a raw, rather uncivilized territory before it became one of the last states to enter the Union. Few towns exemplify this more than Prescott. Untamed land lured those who saw an opportunity to prosper, including a number of shady ladies. A staple of any western town, these wanton women were independent, hearty indi...

From the bestselling author of The Accidental Billionaires and Bringing Down the House, this is the incredible true story of how a college student and two female accomplices stole some of the rarest objects on the planet—moon rocks—from an "impregnable" high-tech vault.But breaking into a highly secure laboratory wasn't easy. Thad Roberts, an intern in a prestigious NASA training program, would have to concoct a meticulous plan to get past security checkpoints, an...

Hailed as "a rip-snortin', six-guns-blazin' saga of good guys and bad guys who were sometimes one and the same," Robert M. Utley's Lone Star Justice captured the colorful first century of Texas Ranger history. Now, in the eagerly anticipated conclusion, Lone Star Lawmen, Utley once again chronicles the daring exploits of the Rangers, this time as they bring justice to the twentieth-century West. Based on unprecedented access to Ranger archives, this fast-paced narrative s...

On a chilly October afternoon in 1881, two brothers named Tom and Frank McLaury were gunned down on the streets of Tombstone, Arizona, by the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday. The deadly event became known as the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and in a quirk of fate, the brothers names became well-known, but only as bad men and outlaws. Did they deserve that reputation? The McLaurys in Tombstone, Arizona: An O.K. Corral Obituary explores this question, revealing details of their family backgro...

Timmy Overton of Austin and Jerry Ray James of Odessa were football stars who traded athletics for lives of crime. The original rebels without causes, nihilists with Cadillacs and Elvis hair, the Overton gang and their associates formed a ragtag white trash mafia that bedazzled Austin law enforcement for most of the 1960s. Tied into a loose network of crooked lawyers, pimps and used car dealers who became known as the "traveling criminals," they burglarized banks and ran smuggling and pros...

An important investigation of the sociocultural fallout of America's work on the atomic bombIn The Nuclear Borderlands, Joseph Masco offers an in-depth look at the long-term consequences of the Manhattan Project. Masco examines how diverse groups in and around Los Alamos, New Mexico understood and responded to the U.S. nuclear weapons project in the post–Cold War period. He shows that the American focus on potential nuclear apocalypse during the Cold War o...

Two famous 19th century outlaws from opposite sides of the world are brought to rollicking life in the acclaimed historian's "marvelous dual biography" (Douglas Brinkley, author of The Wilderness Warrior).The legendary exploits of Billy the Kid and Ned Kelly live on in the public imaginations of their respective countries, the United States and Australia. But the outlaws' reputations are so mythologized, the truth of their lives has become obscure. In ...

The shots that killed President John F. Kennedy in November 1963 were fired from the sixth floor of a nondescript warehouse at the edge of Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas. That floor in the Texas School Book Depository became a museum exhibit in 1989 and was designated part of a National Historic Landmark District in 1993. This book recounts the slow and painful process by which a city and a nation came to terms with its collective memory of the assassination and its aftermath.Step...

In 1903 the AT&SF Railroad began laying track on the Belen Cutoff from Belen, New Mexico to Amarillo, Texas. The railroad company encouraged settlement of New Mexico’s eastern plains by sponsoring emigrant trains, a quicker method of transport for settlers moving their belongings and livestock across the country. Towns were founded along the route with the arrival of the railroad. Billy the Kid was shot and killed by Pat Garrett in Fort Sumner. Taiban’s Pink Pony Saloon & Dancehall publici...