Desperados & Cow-Punchers

Two riveting accounts of bad men, gunslingers and cowboys

This book contains two accounts of the American Western Frontier—the ‘Old Wild West’—by Emerson Hough, who was a well-known and prolific writer of highly regarded western stories and historical novels and an expert on the reality of those exciting times. He was a colleague of George Bird Grinnell who is also in the first rank of Western frontier historians and Hough’s work won the praise of President Theodore Roosevelt who was an enthusiastic frontiersman. The first, and longest, book in this special Leonaur edition is about the perennially popular subject of Western outlaws. Hough describes the activities of infamous desperados including the most infamous locations of their dark deeds from California to Texas. The careers of several ‘bad-men’ are charted, including the lawman/outlaw Henry Plummer, the killer-cannibal Boone Helm, the gun-fighter Joseph (Jack) Slade and, of course, the incomparable Wild Bill Hickok. Several range wars also come under Hough’s scrutiny including the Lincoln County and Stevens County Wars. The book includes notable anecdotes of gun-fights including ‘the Fight of Buckskin Roberts’, one of Pat Garrett’s man-hunts and others. The second book in this edition concerns those westerners who carved out a new nation including the pathfinders, the pioneers, the homesteaders, the miners, the soldiers in ‘dirty-shirt blue’ who fought the American Indian tribes and the ‘cattle barons’ and cowboys who drove the great herds across the plains to the rail-heads of the transcontinental railroad.

Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket; our hardbacks are cloth bound and feature gold foil lettering on their spines and fabric head and tail bands.