Edward Zane Carroll Judson aka Ned Buntline (1821–1886) was responsible for creating a highly romantic and often misleading image of the American West, albeit one that the masses found irresistible in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Some scholars estimate that he wrote at least four hundred dime novels over his lifetime, and perhaps as many as six hundred.While he is best known for discovering William Frederick Cody (Buffalo Bill) and making the irrepressible scout a star, Juds...

Today, most remember “California Girl” Lillian Frances Smith (1871–1930) as Annie Oakley’s chief competitor in the small world of the Wild West shows’ female shooters. But the two women were quite different: Oakley’s conservative “prairie beauty” persona clashed with Smith’s tendency to wear flashy clothes and keep company with the cowboys and American Indians she performed with. This lively first biography chronicles the Wild West showbiz life that Smith led and explores the talents that ...

Nineteen-year-old Burmah Adams, a hairdresser and former Santa Ana High School student, spent her honeymoon on a crime spree. She and her husband of less than one week, White, an ex-con, robbed at least twenty people in and around downtown L.A. at gunpoint over an eight-week period. But the worst of their crimes was the shooting of a popular elementary school teacher, Cora Withington, and a former publisher, Crombie Allen, who was teaching her how to drive his new car.A few days la...

She may have been holding a gun, or an axe, or her hiked-up skirts, but she was there, in the Klondike of the Gold Rush. And her decision to venture everything on the dream of northern gold was in every way bolder and riskier than any man’s.In Frontier Spirit, Jennifer Duncan celebrates the lives of women who, in defiance of traditional expectations, left their homes, their families, and their professions, to make the arduous journey through a punishing climate and...

Forget Doris Day singing on the stagecoach. Forget Robin Weigert’s gritty portrayal on HBO’s Deadwood. The real Calamity Jane was someone the likes of whom you’ve never encountered. That is, until now.This book is a definitive biography of Martha Canary, the woman popularly known as Calamity Jane. Written by one of today’s foremost authorities on this notorious character, it is a meticulously researched account of how an alcoholic prostitute was transformed into a Wild Wes...

Cowboy and drifter Frank Clifford lived a lot of lives—and raised a lot of hell—in the first quarter of his life. The number of times he changed his name—Clifford being just one of them—suggests that he often traveled just steps ahead of the law. During the 1870s and 1880s his restless spirit led him all over the Southwest, crossing the paths of many of the era’s most notorious characters, most notably Clay Allison and Billy the Kid.More than just an entertaining and informative na...

Through his incredibly varied fifty-year career, John J. Healy left an indelible mark on the Canadian and American west. At different points in his storied life, Healy was a soldier, a trapper, a prospector, a free trader, an explorer, a horse dealer, a scout, a lawman, a newspaper editor, a speculator, a merchant, a capitalist, a historian, and a politician. He defied classification while defining the lifestyle of a frontier adventurer and buccaneer capitalist in the late nineteenth centu...

Through bravery, courage and strength of character these men and women stood head and shoulders above their contemporaries.They are our true Western American Heroes.

Overnight settlements, better known as "Hell on Wheels," sprang up as the transcontinental railroad crossed Nebraska and Wyoming. They brought opportunity not only for legitimate business but also for gamblers, land speculators, prostitutes, and thugs. Dick Kreck tells their stories along with the heroic individuals who managed, finally, to create permanent towns in the interior West.

“WANTED. YOUNG, SKINNY, WIRY FELLOWS. NOT OVER 18. MUST BE EXPERT RIDERS. WILLING TO RISK DEATH DAILY. ORPHANS PREFERRED.”—California newspaper help-wanted ad, 1860The Pony Express is one of the most celebrated and enduring chapters in the history of the United States, a story of the all-American traits of bravery, bravado, and entrepreneurial risk that are part of the very fabric of the Old West. No image of the American West in the mid-1800s is more familiar, more beloved,...

With a widowed mother and six siblings, Annie Oakley first became a trapper, hunter, and sharpshooter simply to put food on the table. Yet her genius with the gun eventually led to her stardom in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show during the latter half of the nineteenth century. The archetypal western woman, Annie Oakley urged women to take up shooting to procure food, protect themselves, and enjoy healthy exercise, yet she was also the proper Victorian lady, demurely dressed and skeptical abo...

The women in these stories did the unthinkable for their time: they followed their own paths, flouting convention and daring to break from the traditions of family and marriage. They chose a life outside the norm, a decision for which most paid dearly. Nell Shipman was overlooked because she was not as acquiescent as required; she opened an independent production company just when the major Hollywood studios began exerting their power. Isobel Gunn, once revealed to be a woman, lost her liv...