Outlaw Tales Of California

Massacres, mayhem, and mischief fill the pages of Outlaw Tales of California 2, with compelling legends of the Golden State's most despicable desperadoes. Ride with horse thieves and cattle rustlers, duck the bullets of murderers, plot strategies with con artists, and hiss at lawmen turned outlaws.

This collection of fifty outlaw tales includes well-knowns such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Frank and Jesse James, Belle Starr (and her dad), and Pancho Villa, along with a fair smattering of women, organized crime bosses, smugglers, and of course the usual suspects: highwaymen, bank and train robbers, cattle rustlers, snake-oil salesmen, and horse thieves. Men like Henry Brown and Burt Alvord worked on both sides of the law either at different times of their lives or simultaneously. Clever shyster Soapy Smith and murderer Martin Couk survived by their wits, while the outlaw careers of the dimwitted DeAutremont brothers and bigmouthed Diamondfield Jack were severely limited by their intellect, or lack thereof. Nearly everyone in these pages was motivated by greed, revenge, or a lethal mixture of the two. The most bloodthirsty of the bunch, such as the heartless (and, some might argue, soulless) Annie Cook and trigger-happy Augustine Chacón, surely had evil written into their very DNA.

Early outlaws tell their own raw tales of holdups, shootouts, and desperate flights from the law. Witness the cruel confessions of California bandits during the opening days of the Gold Rush, stage robbers, and California highwaymen. These tales of harrowing and sometimes hilarious antics are accompanied by many rare photographs.

This collection of scholarly essays presents new work from in an emerging line of inquiry: modern outlaw narratives and the textual and cultural relevance of food and feasting. Food, its preparation and its consumption, is presented in outlaw narratives as central points of human interaction, community, conflict, and fellowship. Feast scenes perform a wide variety of functions, serving as cultural repositories of manners and behaviors, catalysts for adventure, or moments of regrouping and redirecting narratives. The book argues that modern outlaw narratives illuminate a potent cross-cultural need for freedom, solidarity, and justice, and it examines ways in which food and feasting are often used to legitimate difference, create discord, and manipulate power dynamics.

A refreshing new perspective on some of the most infamous reprobates of the West.

These entertaining stories from Old West history include cowboys, Indians, lawmen, lawbreakers, entertainers, prostitutes, priests, and politicians. They all helped shape the myth and legend of the American West. This book reveals the stories of characters like Mary Fields, Cleophas Dowd, and Judge Roy Bean, and offers glimpses of gunfights, holdups, mining claim battles, and more.

This book has 41 different chapters on California's gold rush and development history. Read about The Lost Spanish Galleon, Pegleg Smith's Lost Gold Mine, Joaquin Murrieta, and railroad titans.

Principles of Posse Management tells the stories of the lawmen and leaders of the Old West who organized citizens in the pursuit of law and order. This collection of tales reveals what Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and other legends of the old west knew about leadership with a clever twist on the classic shoot-em-up, black-hats-vs-white-hats tale.