Outlaws and Lawmen of the West, Vol. 2

John Abbott is a professor of history at Laurentian University’s Algoma University College. He is the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste Marie and The History of Fort St. Joseph.

Wyatt Earp, Bill Longley, Dave Mather, Bat Masterson, Luke Short, Ben
Thompson, Wild Bill Hickok, Charlie Siringo, and Bill Doolin: few
readers north of the Rio Grande would be able to identify them all, but
fewer still would fail to recognize at least one of them from reading
the pulps, watching movies, or viewing television. By combining the eye
and ear of the storyteller with the historian’s respect for integrity
and context, Dan Asfar presents nine accounts that entertain as much as
they demystify.

He puts America’s aggressive occupation of the trans-Mississippi west
into the context of Manifest Destiny, the Civil War and Reconstruction,
the Great Barbecue and its headlong rushes for wealth in real estate,
gold, silver, and the vice trades. Above all, it was a context saturated
by an obsessive individualism that resisted limits. These are stories
whose energy arises from the interplay between character and such
circumstance. All the players starring in these tales were young, many
of them seething with unresolved and perhaps intractable conflicts. They
sought their fortunes in an environment where the law was often
determined by local “warlords,” where it was mutable and friable,
and “almost everyone was armed and most of the socializing took place
in saloons.”

Although Asfar presents each individual in a separate chapter, their
stories, taken together, exhibit a certain cohesiveness. Common
themes—the cattle drive, Civil War animosities, Texan orneriness,
saloon interests, gambling and whoring—contribute a sense of
integration, as do the coalitions these individuals created as they
sought safety or advantage in supporting or opposing what passed for
“the law” in those parts. The author’s attention to the art of
storytelling and the craft of history recommends this volume to those
who know a little about the people and the period, but wish to know more
and get it right.