These are some of their stories. A catalogue of evil, including; Sean Vincent Gillis: A depraved psychopath who used his victims' body parts as sex toys.Thomas Piper: Outwardly respectable clergyman who had a deadly obsession with little girls.Louise Peete: Sex-crazed femme fatale who committed three murders and also drove four of her husbands to suicide. Thor Nis Christiansen: Killed four young women in order to have sex with their corpses.Roger Kibbe: The ruthless I-5 Strangler murdered at least 8 stranded female motorists along California's freeways.Orville Lee Majors: Angel of Death who waged a deadly campaign against his elderly patients. Believed to be responsible for over 100 murders.Robert Shulman: This Long Island prostitute slayer bludgeoned his victims before hacking them to pieces. Tillie Klimek: "Psychic" who predicted her victims' deaths, right before she poisoned them. Jarvis Catoe: D.C. serial killer whose murder spree prompted a Congressional hearing, and changes to the Washington Police Department. Mack Ray Edwards: Edwards found a unique way of getting rid of his victims - he buried them under the freeways he was building.

    For several years at the end of the 1890s, the two friends, along with a revolving cast who made up their band of thieves, eluded local law enforcement and bounty hunters, all while stealing from the rich bankers and eastern railroad corporations who exploited western land. The close calls were many, but Butch and Sundance always managed to escape to rob again another day—that is, until they rode headlong into the 20th century.Fenced-in range, telephone lines, electric lights, and new crime-fighting techniques were quickly rendering obsolete the outlaws of the wide open frontier. Knowing their time was up, Butch and Sundance, along with a mysterious beauty named Etta Place, headed to South America, vowing to leave their criminal careers behind. But riding the trails of Chile, Argentina and Bolivia, Butch and Sundance would find that crime wasn’t through with them just yet.In The Last Outlaws, Thom Hatch brings these memorable characters to life like never before: Butch, the brains of the outfit; Sundance, the man of action; and the men on both sides of the law whom they fought with and against. From their early holdup attempts to that fateful day in Bolivia, author Thom hatch draws on a wealth of fresh research to go beyond the myth and provide a compelling new look at these legends of the Wild West.

    That day--chosen completely at random--turned out to be Sunday, December 28, 1986, by any conventional measure a most ordinary day. Weingarten spent the next six years proving that there is no such thing.That Sunday between Christmas and New Year's turned out to be filled with comedy, tragedy, implausible irony, cosmic comeuppances, kindness, cruelty, heroism, cowardice, genius, idiocy, prejudice, selflessness, coincidence, and startling moments of human connection, along with evocative foreshadowing of momentous events yet to come. Lives were lost. Lives were saved. Lives were altered in overwhelming ways. Many of these events never made it into the news; they were private dramas in the lives of private people. They were utterly compelling.One Day asks and answers the question of whether there is even such a thing as "ordinary" when we are talking about how we all lurch and stumble our way through the daily, daunting challenge of being human.

    New in paperbackWhat was achieved and destroyed, what was made up and forgotten in the American West as the continent was mapped, the natives were displaced, and exploits were transformed into legends? In this acclaimed collection, Larry McMurtry profiles explorers and martyrs, hucksters and scholars--figures in the West's enduring yet ever-shifting mixture of myth and reality.In these twelve pieces, McMurtry explores John Wesley Powell's journey on the Colorado, the dispossession of the Five Civilized Tribes, the fascination the Zuni held over a parade of unscrupulous anthropologists, and--in the bicentennial of their journey--the journals of Lewis and Clark, "our only really American epic."

    Cody—known across the land as Buffalo Bill—conceived of his Wild West show, an “equestrian extravaganza” featuring cowboys and Indians. The idea took off. For four months in 1885 the Lakota chief Sitting Bull appeared in the show. Blood Brothers tells the story of these two iconic figures through their brief but important collaboration.Blood Brothers flashes back to 1876, when the Lakota wiped out Custer’s 7th Cavalry unit at the Little Big Horn. Sitting Bull did not participate in the “last stand,” but was nearby—and blamed for killing Custer. The book also flashes forward to 1890, when Sitting Bull was assassinated. Hours before, Cody rushed to Sitting Bull’s cabin at Standing Rock, dispatched by the army to avert a disaster.Deanne Stillman unearths little told details about the two men and their tumultuous times. Their alliance was eased by none other than Annie Oakley. When Sitting Bull joined the Wild West, the event spawned one of the earliest advertising slogans: “Foes in ’76, Friends in ’85”—referring to the Little Big Horn. Cody paid his performers well, and he treated the Indians no differently from white performers. During this time, the Native American rights movement began to flourish. But with their way of life in tatters, the Lakota and others availed themselves of the chance to perform in the Wild West. When Cody died in 1917, a large contingent of Native Americans attended his public funeral.An iconic friendship tale like no other, Blood Brothers is truly a timeless story of people from different cultures who crossed barriers to engage each other as human beings. And it foretells today’s battle on the Great Plains.

    C. Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moon spans two astonishing stories. The first traces the rise and fall of the Comanches, the most powerful Indian tribe in American history. The second entails one of the most remarkable narratives ever to come out of the Old West: the epic saga of the pioneer woman Cynthia Ann Parker and her mixed-blood son Quanah, who became the last and greatest chief of the Comanches. Although readers may be more familiar with the tribal names Apache and Sioux, it was in fact the legendary fighting ability of the Comanches that determined just how and when the American West opened up. Comanche boys became adept bareback riders by age six; full Comanche braves were considered the best horsemen who ever rode. They were so masterful at war and so skillful with their arrows and lances that they stopped the northern drive of colonial Spain from Mexico and halted the French expansion westward from Louisiana. White settlers arriving in Texas from the eastern United States were surprised to find the frontier being rolled backward by Comanches incensed by the invasion of their tribal lands. So effective were the Comanches that they forced the creation of the Texas Rangers and account for the advent of the new weapon specifically designed to fight them: the six-gun. The war with the Comanches lasted four decades, in effect holding up the development of the new American nation. Gwynne’s exhilarating account delivers a sweeping narrative that encompasses Spanish colonialism, the Civil War, the destruction of the buffalo herds, and the arrival of the railroads—a historical feast for anyone interested in how the United States came into being. Against this backdrop Gwynne presents the compelling drama of Cynthia Ann Parker, a lovely nine-year-old girl with cornflower-blue eyes who was kidnapped by Comanches from the far Texas frontier in 1836. She grew to love her captors and became infamous as the "White Squaw" who refused to return until her tragic capture by Texas Rangers in 1860. More famous still was her son Quanah, a warrior who was never defeated and whose guerrilla wars in the Texas Panhandle made him a legend. S. C. Gwynne’s account of these events is meticulously researched, intellectually provocative, and, above all, thrillingly told.

    Bill, aging and sick but still able to best any man in a fair gunfight, just wants to be left alone to drink and play cards. But in this town of played-out miners, bounty hunters, upstairs girls, Chinese immigrants, and various other entrepeneurs and miscreants, he finds himself pursued by a vicious sheriff, a perverse whore man bent on revenge, and a besotted Calamity Jane. Fueled by liquor, sex, and violence, this is the real wild west, unlike anything portrayed in the dime novels that first told its story.

    This outlaw turned Texas Ranger was one of the favorite protagonists of master storyteller Louis L’Amour, appearing in a total of nineteen short stories bursting with unforgettable heroics and harrowing action. They’re all here in this eBook bundle, together forming an epic portrait of a man standing at the crossroads between good and evil:   McNelly Knows a Ranger • A Job for a Ranger • Bowdrie Rides a Coyote Trail • A Trail to the West • The Outlaws of Poplar Creek • Bowdrie Follows a Cold Trail • More Brains Than Bullets • The Road to Casa Piedras • Bowdrie Passes Through • Where Buzzards Fly • South of Deadwood • Too Tough to Brand • Case Closed—No Prisoners • The Killer from the Pecos • A Ranger Rides to Town • Rain on the Mountain Fork • Down Sonora Way • Strange Pursuit • Strawhouse Trail   The name is Bowdrie. It was a name that caused the most hardened gunmen to break out in a cold sweat. Chick Bowdrie. He could have ridden the outlaw trail, but the Texas Rangers recruited him because they didn’t want to have to fight against him. Pursuing the most wanted men in the Southwest, he knew all too well the dusty trails, the bitter cattle feuds, the desperate killers, and the quiet, weather-beaten, wind-blasted towns that could explode into action with the wrong word. He had sworn to carry out the law, but there were times when he had to apply justice with his fists and his guns. They called in the Rangers to handle the tough ones, and there was never a Ranger tougher or smarter than Bowdrie.

    This enhanced version of her original manuscript adds explanatory notes, photos, maps, drawings, and 3d visualizations. The bonus material adds a layer of context to make Sager’s fascinating account even more vivid.Catherine Sager faced almost unimaginable hardship: both her parents died on the journey west on the Oregon Trail; a few years later her adoptive parents were brutally murdered before her eyes. She was even kidnapped and held for ransom. Yet Catherine was a survivor, and she lived a long life in Oregon. Her accounts of life on the Oregon Trail and the Whitman Massacre remain important historical documents. At the same time, she is an excellent writer who knows how to engage the reader.

    Still, this first-hand account does shed much light on what it was really like to come under the charge of many different Indian tribes.Although Brayton’s treatment was not entirely negative or positive, his frank and blunt story does much to dispel the romantic stories that have been perpetuated about young settlers’ children who became Indian chattel. It does much to tell true history and dispel any deliberate or accidental revisions. In many cases the Indians treated Brayton well, but there can be no doubt that they stole from him and his family a life that would end up confused and stuck between two worlds. Although Brayton did finally unite with many of his natural family, he never stopped identifying with Native Americans, and he was forced to leave an Indian wife and child behind. In fact, when the War of Rebellion or Civil War broke out, Brayton enlisted and served in an American Indian brigade. Chet DembeckPublisher of One

    The Wild West has been tamed and its fierce, independent and often violent larger-than-life figures--gun-toting wanderers, trappers, prospectors, Indian fighters, cowboys, and lawmen--are now victims of their own success. But then gold is discovered in Alaska and the adjacent Canadian Klondike and a new frontier suddenly looms: an immense unexplored territory filled with frozen waterways, dark spruce forests, and towering mountains capped by glistening layers of snow and ice.In a true-life tale that rivets from the first page, we meet Charlie Siringo, a top-hand sharp-shooting cowboy who becomes one of the Pinkerton Detective Agency's shrewdest; George Carmack, a California-born American Marine who's adopted by an Indian tribe, raises a family with a Taglish squaw, and makes the discovery that starts off the Yukon Gold Rush; and Jefferson "Soapy" Smith, a sly and inventive conman who rules a vast criminal empire. As we follow this trio's lives, we're led inexorably into a perplexing mystery: a fortune in gold bars has somehow been stolen from the fortress-like Treadwell Mine in Juneau, Alaska. Charlie Siringo discovers that to run the thieves to ground, he must embark on a rugged cross-territory odyssey that will lead him across frigid waters and through a frozen wilderness to face down "Soapy" Smith and his gang of 300 cutthroats. Hanging in the balance: George Carmack's fortune in gold.At once a compelling true-life mystery and an unforgettable portrait of a time in America's history, The Floor of Heaven is also an exhilarating tribute to the courage and undaunted spirit of the men and women who helped shape America.

    Holliday, D. D. S., better known as Doc Holliday, has become a legendary figure in the history of the American West. In Doc Holliday: A Family Portrait, Karen Holliday Tanner reveals the real man behind the legend. Shedding light on Holliday’s early years, in a prominent Georgia family during the Civil War and Reconstruction, she examines the elements that shaped his destiny: his birth defect, the death of his mother and estrangement from his father, and the diagnosis of tuberculosis, which led to his journey west. The influence of Holliday’s genteel upbringing never disappeared, but it was increasingly overshadowed by his emerging western personality. Holliday himself nurtured his image as a frontier gambler and gunman.Using previously undisclosed family documents and reminiscences as well as other primary sources, Tanner documents the true story of Doc’s friendship with the Earp brothers and his run-ins with the law, including the climactic shootout at the O. K. Corral and its aftermath.This first authoritative biography of Doc Holliday should appeal both to historians of the West and to general readers who are interested in his poignant story.

    government—an usher in the White House. For more than 200 years, a small office has operated on the State Floor of the White House Executive Residence. Known as the Usher's Office, whose mission is to accommodate the personal needs of the first family, and to make the White House feel like a home. The Usher's Office is the managing office of the Executive Residence and its staff of 90-plus. The staff consists of butlers, carpenters, grounds personnel, electricians, painters, plumbers, florists, maids, housemen, cooks, chefs, storekeepers, curators, calligraphers, doormen, and administrative support. Ushers work closely with the first family, senior staff, Social Office, Press Office, Secret Service Agency, and military leaders to carry out White House functions: luncheons, dinners, teas, receptions, meetings, conferences, and more. Chris Emery was only the 18th White House Usher since 1891, and had the honor and privilege to serve presidential families for three years during the Reagan administration, four years for President H. W. Bush, and 14 months under President Clinton. His vignettes recreate intimate White House happenings from an insider’s viewpoint. Chris Emery was the only White House Usher to be terminated in the 20th century. Turn the pages to find out which first lady fired him... “With his book, White House Usher: Stories from the Inside, former usher Chris Emery gives his readers a peek inside what happens upstairs at the White House. Chris’ anecdotes tell a rich story of how America’s house really is the First Families’ home. I loved my trip down memory lane.” - Former First Lady Barbara Bush (October 2017)

    At the peak of Red Cloud’s powers the Sioux could claim control of one-fifth of the contiguous United States and the loyalty of thousands of fierce fighters. But the fog of history has left Red Cloud strangely obscured. Now, thanks to the rediscovery of a lost autobiography, and painstaking research by two award-winning authors, the story of our nation’s most powerful and successful Indian warrior can finally be told.

    "A splendid, indeed brilliant new work by an outstanding historian of the American West." —Howard Lamar,  author of The New Encyclopedia of the American West, Sterling Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University"A thorough job...a fine book." —Larry McMurtry