Excavating the reality behind the myth, Joseph Rosa delves into the exploits and ego that defined Hickok and shows how the man was overtaken by his own legend. Rosa exposes a...

The gunfighter was a man bred in a lawless and violent era of civil war, range wars, and greed for land and gold. He played a real and deadly part in a period when men were conditioned to settle differences with gunplay. He shot and fought and killed throughout Texas in its struggle with Mexico, along the Kansas-Missouri border, and up and down the cattle trails. Black powder smoke from his guns darkened the Kansas cow towns and the Far West mining camps.

What part of the gunfighter legend is true, and what part a novelist's or screenwriter's fantasy? What has been the gunfighter's...

Of all the Old West figures whose images eventually found their way into our popular culture, none was better known than Wild Bill Hickok. This book, a companion volume to Joseph Rosa s exhaustive biography, They Called Him Wild Bill, reproduces in one volume nearly all the known portraits of Wild Bill, together with photographs of his family, his friends, his foes, and the places that knew him."

Based upon contemporary and informed opinion, "Age of the Gunfighter" tells of a tempestuous time and many a notorious gunfighter. Few of those who achieved fame and a reputation lived into old age. Ed Masterson, Tom Smith, and Bill Tilghman, for example, died in the line of duty. Others, like Wild Bill Hickok, Jesse James, and Billy the Kid, were murdered because of their reputations, at the hands of the law or for personal or financial gain. And the few who survived into old age in the twentieth century, such as Wyatt Earp, were men out of place and time, steeped in nostalgia for an era...