This book is often called a condensed criminal history of the far west. It presents the memoirs of general D. J. Cook, who was a chief of the Rocky Mountain Detective Association. During his career, Cook was responsible for over 3,000 arrests, many of which are described in this memoir.
General David J. Cook was a legend during his lifetime, known throughout the United States as a tireless, fearless, and very successful lawman. Operating with the Rocky Mountain Detective Association, Cook and his colleagues tracked down and captured scores of bad men when the term "bad men" really meant something. More than once, these lawmen in lawless places defended their lives and the lives citizens by being quicker on the draw or better-armed than their opponents. Here are real Old West stories told in thrilling episodes by David Cook himself. Nearly 120 years since its first publication have not dulled the excitement and danger. Cook was a born detective. When asked one day how he happened to follow this business, he replied: “It is natural. I can’t help it; I like it.” Every memoir of the American West provides us with another view of the westward expansion that changed the country forever. For the first time, this long out-of-print volume is available as an affordable, well-formatted book for e-readers and smartphones. Be sure to LOOK INSIDE by clicking the cover above or download a sample.
An Essential Compendium for Any Firearms or Old West Aficionado, richly and comprehensively illustrated. Written by one of the foremost firearms experts of the twentieth century, Charles Edward Chapel’s Guns of the Old West is an exhaustively researched document that not only boasts a significant collection of antique Western guns, but also categorizes the firearms into easy-to-reference sections. Starting with an introductory chapter on the origins of guns and their earliest uses on the frontier, Chapel covers everything from muskets to rifles, pistols to revolvers, and shotguns to martial arms. Three whole chapters are dedicated to the rise and fall of the famous Deringer pistol. And as much as Guns of the Old West is an encyclopedic reference manual, it also contains fascinating historical literature that frames the world in which these guns were used. Buffalo guns and hunters are covered, along with martial arms of the post-Civil War era. The gun collection of famous collector and hunter President Theodore Roosevelt is given its own chapter. Illustrated with nearly five hundred illustrations, as well as important artwork from the Western period from artists such as Frederic Remington, Guns of the Old West is an essential work for gun collectors and American history enthusiasts.
First edition, but not in the printed wrappers. First issue cloth with the hands and knife graphic. Adams states this graphic represents Wild Bill Hickok's hands and the knife he is supposed to have given Cook. Half-title with the cover image from the wrappers.
Beginning with the 1760s, when lynching and vigilantism came into existence in what is now the United States, this bibliography fills a void in the history of American collective violence. It covers over 4,200 works dealing with vigilante movements and lynchings, including books, articles, government documents, and unpublished theses and dissertations. Following a chapter listing general works, the book is arranged into four chronological chapters, a chapter on the frontier West, a chapter on anti-lynching, and chapters on literature and art. The book opens with a chapter devoted to general works. It then includes chapters on the period from the Colonial era to the Civil War, the Civil War through 1881, and the periods from 1882 to 1916 and 1917 to 1996. The work then turns to the frontier West and to anti-lynching bills, laws, organizations, and leaders. Finally, the book includes chapters on vigilantism in literature and art.
Mining Irish-American Lives focuses on the importance and influence of the Irish within the mining frontier of the American West. Scholarship of the West has largely ignored the complicated lives of the Irish people in mining towns, whose life details are often kept to a bare minimum. This book uses individual stories and the histories of different communities—Randsburg, California; Virginia City, Nevada; Leadville, Colorado; Butte, Montana; Idaho’s Silver Valley; and the Comstock Lode, for example—to explore Irish and Irish-American lives. Historian Alan J. M. Noonan uses a range of previously overlooked sources, including collections of emigrant letters, hospital logbooks, private detective reports, and internment records, to tell the stories of Irish men and women who emigrated to mining towns to search for opportunity. Noonan details the periods, the places, and the experiences over multiple generations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He carefully examines their encounters with nativists, other ethnic groups, and mining companies to highlight the contested emergence of a hyphenated Irish-American identity. Unearthing personal details along with the histories of different communities, the book investigates Irish immigrants and Irish-Americans through the prism of their own experiences, significantly enriching the history of the period.