American Outlaw

The Discovery Channel star offers an honest reflection on the highs and lows of his life, from his troubled youth to his failed marriages, and discusses his struggle to overcome his own personal demons and make peace with his past.

This book explores in depth the origins, development, and prospects of outlawry and of the relationship of outlaws to the social conditions of changing times. Throughout American history you will find larger-than-life brigands in every period and every region. Often, because we hunger for simple justice, we romanticize them to the point of being unable to separate fact from fiction. Frank Richard Prassel brings this home in a thorough and fascinating examination of the concept of outlawry from Robin Hood, Dick Turpin, and Blackbeard through Jean Lafitte, Pancho Villa, and Billy the Kid to more modern personalities such as John Dillinger, Claude Dallas, and D. B. Cooper. A separate chapter on molls, plus equal treatment in the histories of gangs, traces women's involvement in outlaw activities. Prassel covers the folklore as well as the facts, even including an appendix of ballads by and about outlaws. He makes clear how this motley group of bandits, pirates, highwaymen, desperadoes, rebels, hoodlums, renegades, gangsters, and fugitives—who stand tall in myth—wither in the light of truth, but flourish in the movies. As he tells the stories, there is little to confirm that Jesse and Frank James, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the Daltons, Pretty Boy Floyd, Ma Barker, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, Belle Starr, the Apache Kid, or any of the so-called good badmen, did anything that did not enrich or otherwise benefit themselves. But there is plenty of evidence, in the form of slain victims and ruined lives, to show how many ways they caused harm. The Great American Outlaw is as much an excellent survey on the phenomenon as it is a brilliant exposition of the larger than-life figures who created it. Above all, it is a tribute to that aspect of humanity that Americans admire most and that Prassel describes as a willingness "to fight, however hopelessly, against exhibitions of privilege."

Bill Doolin was perhaps the last great American outlaw of the nineteenth century. Once part of the Doolin-Dalton gang, he rode and robbed in the wild Indian Territory that would become Oklahoma. The Daltons were eventually shot to ribbons in their failed attempt to rob two banks at once in Coffeyville, Kansas. But Doolin went on to form a new gang that included notables such as Bitter Creek Newcomb, Black Face Charlie Pierce, a remaining Dalton brother, and the Rose of the Cimarron, Rose Dunn, sister of the notorious Dunn Brothers. Pursuing the gang was a tenacious group of U.S. marshals led by the famed Bill Tilghman. Doolin was considered something of a Robin Hood to the locals—everybody but those he robbed and killed. The marshals were determined to end his reign of terror no matter how long it took. The country, after all, was heading into a new century, and outlaws like Doolin no longer had a place in the West.

"For a century Butch Cassidy has been the subject of legends about his life and death, spawning a small industry of mythmakers and a major Hollywood film. Charles Leerhsen sorts out fact from fiction to find the real Butch Cassidy, who is far more complicated and fascinating than legend has it"--

Jimmy Maxwell takes you behind the violent prison walls and to the top of one of Oklahoma's most feared gangs. Be there as he walks out the gates for the first time in 16 years.And stand with Jimmy -or against him- as the federal marshals go all-out to get him locked back behind them. His story is featured on MSNBC'S LOCKUP and Dicovery's IAGA"

The scion of one of the West's great outlaws comes home from the war in Iraq--Gilman James, the last of three childhood friends to return.His brothers-in-arms are mere shadows of their former selves--Gil, unmarked--determines to take care of them. But how far should a man go for the people he loves?Stepping across the line between right and wrong, Gil finds himself stranded in the Texan desert-as a bank heist he's planned goes horribly wrong. Pursued into the badlands by US Marshal John Whicher, Gil crosses paths with Tennille Labrea; an outlander, with her own demons to fight. Shielding a secret too precious to share with anyone, she's ready to cross her own line in the sand.What makes an outlaw? Marshal John Whicher, veteran of the First Gulf War thinks he knows. But can natural justice ever outrank the law? For three very different people a moment of reckoning is set in train: violent, defining; inescapable.

One September night in 1891 the Wild West went east. A masked man boarded the American Express Special train as it sped through New York State and single-handedly stole a fortune. His name was Oliver Curtis Perry, and he instantly became the country's most wanted man. While detectives searched in vain, the public and press couldn't get enough of the handsome, charismatic young robber whose physical daring was matched by stories of a troubled childhood and romantic life. Women adored him, boys worshipped him: America was falling in love. Five months later he defied belief by robbing the same train again. This time, after one of the most extraordinary chases in history, he was caught and sentenced to forty-nine years hard labor. But if the authorities believed they had beaten this celebrity criminal they were badly mistaken. Perry's prison life proved as remarkable as his robberies as he turned escape artist, protestor, hunger-striker, and finally poet in his determination to win his freedom. In Wanted Man, Tamsin Spargo brings this extraordinary portrait of a forgotten man to life once more as she tells his story of adventure and tragedy.

"A look at the weapons used by infamous outlaws throughout American history, featuring stories of their use, glimpses into the minds behind the trigger fingers, and over 200 historical images"--