Spurred West: Rogues, Treasure Seekers, Bounty Hunters, and Colorful Characters Past and Present
226
Spurred West: Rogues, Treasure Seekers, Bounty Hunters, and Colorful Characters Past and Present
226Paperback
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Overview
A collection of true stories revealing the spellbinding world of the Old West’s greatest and most infamous characters past and present, including bullfighters, treasure seekers, bounty hunters, detectives, gunslingers, rustlers, even the legendary showman Buffalo Bill Cody, and many more.
Just how wild was the "Wild West"—and what’s left of it? A time of legend, adventure, and unspeakable tragedy, America’s Western frontier in the latter half of the nineteenth century helped forge the United States into the country it would become and left an enduring legacy for its people. By the author of Gold! Madness, Murder, and Mayhem in the Colorado Rockies, Spurred West reveals the unusual history behind Colorado’s birth and the cultural formation of the Wild West of the Rocky Mountains.
Written with historical accuracy and research in a compelling, gripping voice, this book examines Colorado’s state heritage while telling colorful stories of historic and modern-day figures, from the bondsmen and gunslingers of old to the buffalo wranglers today. Discover the incredible stories of America’s Wild West and the lasting spirit it has emboldened to carry in Colorado still to this day.
Includes stories based in Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Wyoming and of interest to anyone who loves the West.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781513262420 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | TURNER PUB CO |
| Publication date: | 10/15/2019 |
| Pages: | 226 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Introduction
It was an old gas station somewhere between Cody and Casper, Wyoming, filled with things that had sharp teeth. Through the distorted lens of childhood memory I recall it being dimly lit inside, packed full of taxidermied rattlesnakes, coyotes, and other predators pried from the dark corners of the West. Shelf after shelf contained some new and wondrous curiosity: snakeskin boots with fanged rattlesnake heads still attached, scorpions on cowboy hat bands, snarling dead animals—the store felt wild.
Driving through Wyoming from Colorado to Yellowstone National Park was a regular pilgrimage for my family, and the strange little store in the middle of nowhere was a guaranteed stop along the way. From the walls hung stuffed heads of the incomprehensibly strange Jackalope, that enduring western myth (and joke) about a jackrabbit with horns. The store also had giant containers of water, beef stew, coffee, crackers and a massive barrel full of pickled eggs—everything necessary for a day of rugged adventure in the wilderness. I don’t know if I ever saw the store’s owner, but if I did he must have been a bear of a man, with a thick beard, a booming laugh and maybe a hint of something menacing in his eyes; the kind of man who would cheerfully resort to cannibalism rather than go on a vegan diet.
One year, for no discernible reason, we stopped visiting the strange little store in the middle of the Wyoming shortgrass prairie. But that didn’t keep my imagination from traveling down those dim aisles packed with their monstrous cargo. The massive knives with bone handles behind the counter, jackets constructed of fur and bear claws; all these things only grew in my imagination with each passing year until I didn’t know if it had been real or not. To me it was a piece of the Wild West.
It wasn’t until I was an adult returning on a trip home one year that I remembered to ask about the store, realizing with a start that it had once existed outside of my childhood fantasy. It was then my parents told me it had mysteriously burned to the ground many years ago and no longer existed. But it remains firmly in my memories, and it became wilder with each passing year.
As a journalist working in the Rockies I’ve often seen the relics of the Old West, that time between the end of the Civil War and the late nineteenth century. Ghost towns, abandoned gold mines, and derelict forts still haunt the lonely places between the valleys and mountain passes. I’ve known people who discovered old six-shooters while out panning for gold, or a stash of vintage weapons hidden in a cave behind their house.
The Old West had a specific time and geographic location, and its remnants litter the landscape today like memorials to a time gone but not forgotten. The Wild West, on the other hand, was part real and part imaginary. It was where steely-eyed gunslingers traveled from town to town, bandits robbed stagecoaches, and cowboys rescued damsels in distress. It was a world created by those who hungered for tales of adventure, and by authors who were happy to provide them to their audiences. Some of it was real but much was exaggerated. The real West was filled with farmers, ranchers and miners, people whose lives were grown from the soil, scraped from the rock, and pulled down from the mountains. Those stories were smaller and more difficult, and Americans didn’t want those tales. They wanted heroes and villains.
Dime novels made legends of real-life characters like Wild Bill Hickok and Billy the Kid. Some even straddled the shifting line between the two Wests, like William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, who did his best to educate the world on his version of the real West while further perpetuating the myth of the other. As the gun smoke and dust eventually settled over the era, the Wild West lives on in books, movies, and the limitless borderlands of our thoughts. Time replaced the Old West with the new, but I wanted to know how much was real and what was still left, if there were still traces of the original hiding in the corners of the vanished frontier beyond just imagination. I spent a year searching for the answer, interviewing gunslingers, bounty hunters, bare-knuckle boxers, treasure hunters, brand inspectors, and more to compare them to their historic counterparts. I found the spirit of the Wild West lives on much as it did over a hundred years ago, but sometimes it evolved into something new. It is still wild, dangerous, and unpredictable. And sometimes, every once in a while, it has sharp teeth.
Table of Contents
Introduction 9
Chapter 1 Forging the Wild West 13
Chapter 2 The Bullfighter 25
Chapter 3 Shootists of the Old (and New) West 35
Chapter 4 The March Powwow 49
Chapter 5 Cattle, Blood, and Thunder 58
Chapter 6 The Man Hunter 73
Chapter 7 The Tale of Two Bounty Hunters 83
Chapter 8 Weather, the "Irresistible Violence" 96
Chapter 9 U.S. Marshals and Frontier Justice 111
Chapter 10 The Greatest Lawman of the West 126
Chapter 11 The Last Gunfight 132
Chapter 12 Guns of the West 140
Chapter 13 Call of the Wolves 151
Chapter 14 Bare-Knuckle Boxing 164
Chapter 15 Reenacting the West 179
Chapter 16 The Treasure Hunters 188
Chapter 17 Buffalo Bill's Body 203
Epilogue 212
Bibliography 218
Interviews
"Over the course of a year I traveled the western region to research the Wild West and find what, if anything, was left of it today. As such, I traveled across Colorado and spent a week in a famed outdoor survival school — and attended a lightening-fast gunslinging competition in Pagosa Springs with fast draw enthusiasts from four states.
I went to Wyoming to witness history at the first-ever sanctioned bare-knuckle boxing fight in 130 years and to meet the creator of one of the most powerful handguns on the planet.
I travelled to Montana to look for buried treasure and to chronicle the bloody history of cattle rustling. During my research I interviewed an eclectic millionaire who lives in New Mexico — and buried $10 million in the Rockies. I profiled a fearless Kansas bullfighter considered among the best in the world, talked with historians in Washington D.C. about the history of the U.S. Marshals and wrote about Oklahoma’s most famous bounty hunter and inspiration for the Lone Ranger.
My research took me to Arizona and the town of Tombstone, to the Kansas Territory and back again to the Centennial State. Spurred West is about the western region, its history and people — and why the west is still wild."