The story of the five Marlow brothers and their tribulations in late nineteenth-century Texas is the stuff of Old West legend (and served to inspire the John Wayne movie, "The Sons of Katie Elder"). Violent, full of intrigue, with characters of amazing heroism and deplorable cowardice, their story was first related by William Rathmell in "Life of the ""Marlows," a little book published in 1892, shortly after the events it described in Young County, Texas.
It told how Boone, the most reckless of the brothers, shot and killed a popular sheriff and escaped, only to be murdered later by...