Albuquerque's early lawless reputation rivaled that of Dodge City and Tombstone. Its red-light district was known as Hell's Half Acre. Brothel owner Lizzy McGrath once had a local church demolished to build her new bordello. Milt Yarberry, the town's first marshal, was hanged for murder. And the controversial Elfego Baca, who had the gall to face Pancho Villa, survived a thirty-six-hour gunfight unscathed. Author Cody Polston presents the tales of those who slipped through the cracks of morality.
Brian Behnken offers a sweeping examination of the interactions between Mexican-origin people and law enforcement—both legally codified police agencies and extralegal justice—across the U.S. Southwest (especially Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas) from the 1830s to the 1930s. Representing a broad, colonial regime, police agencies and extralegal groups policed and controlled Mexican-origin people to maintain state and racial power in the region, treating Mexicans and Mexican Americans as a "foreign" population that they deemed suspect and undesirable. White Americans justified these perceptions and the acts of violence that they spawned with racist assumptions about the criminality of Mexican-origin people, but Behnken details the many ways Mexicans and Mexican Americans responded to violence, including the formation of self-defense groups and advocacy organizations. Others became police officers, vowing to protect Mexican-origin people from within the ranks of law enforcement. Mexican Americans also pushed state and territorial governments to professionalize law enforcement to halt abuse. The long history of the border region between the United States and Mexico has been one marked by periodic violence, but Behnken shows us in unsparing detail how Mexicans and Mexican Americans refused to stand idly by in the face of relentless assault.
Throughout the development of the American West, prostitution grew and flourished within the mining camps, small towns, and cities of the nineteenth-century Rocky Mountains. Whether escaping a bad home life, lured by false advertising, or seeking to subsidize their income, thousands of women chose or were forced to enter an industry where they faced segregation and persecution, fines and jailing, and battled the hazards of disease, drug addiction, physical abuse, pregnancy, and abortion. They dreamed of escape through marriage or retirement, but more often found relief only in death. An integral part of western history, the stories of these women continue to fascinate readers and captivate the minds of historians today. Expanding on the research she did for Brothels, Bordellos, and Bad Girls (UNM Press), historian Jan MacKell moves beyond the mining towns of Colorado to explore the history of prostitution in the Rocky Mountain states of Arizona, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. Each state had its share of working girls and madams like Big Nose Kate or Calamity Jane who remain celebrities in the annals of history, but MacKell also includes the stories of lesser-known women whose role in this illicit trade nonetheless shaped our understanding of the American West.
Oblivious to the invasions, massacres and religious fanaticism that characterise the 15th century, a young girl falls in love with a noble Arabian tribal leader. But all eyes are on the Portuguese fleets in the Arabian Gulf, intent on securing the profitable spice trade. Abdulaziz Al Mahmoud weaves a tapestry of momentous historical events with stories of love, honour and nobility, while guiding us around the medieval world of Lisbon, Cairo, Jeddah and Istanbul. The Holy Sail brings to life a neglected episode of history that impacted not only the region but the world for centuries to come.
Private eye Ivan Monk takes on his most personal mystery to date—and chases answers deep into America’s haunted past. Long ago, Marshall Spears was a hero of the ballpark. In a time when baseball—and the nation—was segregated, he played in the vaunted Negro Leagues. Decades later, Old Man Spears is living out his days as a fixture in a barbershop in South Central. One afternoon, PI Ivan Monk—a shop regular—learns that Spears’s former teammate was Kennesaw Riles. From family lore, Monk knows Riles is his cousin who was ostracized for the damning testimony he gave during a controversial murder trial in the ’60s—testimony that put a firebrand civil rights leader behind bars. Before Monk can hear more, Old Man Spears drops dead while listening to a ballgame on the radio. Even stranger, the long missing Riles shows up at the Old Man’s funeral services, and dies soon after. Monk knows the timing is not a coincidence. He follows the mystery to the Mississippi Delta. There, he unravels the truth behind the murder of two civil rights era activists. Eventually Monk zeroes in on a group of shadowy Mississippi businessmen-turned-philanthropists who may not have reformed their ways as they claim. Far from Los Angeles, the tenacious private eye confronts his own family history as well as a brand of hatred thought to have died with Jim Crow.
These profiles of the soiled doves who plied the oldest trade in the Rocky Mountains explain many of the facts of life in the nineteenth and twentieth century West.
Before she was Wichita, Kansas, she was a collection of grass huts, home to the ancestors of the Wichita Indians. Then came the Spanish conquistadors, seeking gold but finding instead vast herds of buffalo. After the Civil War, Wichita played host to a cavalcade of Western men: frontier soldiers, Indian warriors, buffalo hunters, border ruffians, hell-for-leather Texas cattle drovers, ready-to-die gunslingers, and steel-eyed lawmen. Peerless Princess of the Plains, they called her. Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, and Bat Masterson were here, but so were Jesse Chisholm, Jack Ledford, Rowdy Joe and Rowdy Kate, Buffalo Bill Mathewson, Marshall Mike Meagher, Indian trader James Mead, Oklahoma Harry Hill, city founder Dutch Bill Greiffenstein, and a host of colorful characters like you've never known before. Stan Hoig depicts a once-rambunctious cowtown on the Chisholm Cattle Trail, neighbor to the lawless Indian Territory, roaring and bucking through its Wild West days toward becoming a major American city. Cowtown Wichita and the Wild, Wicked West provides tribute to those sometimes valiant, sometimes wicked, sometimes hilarious, and often audacious characters who played a role in shaping Wichita's past.
A vast and desolate region, the Texas–New Mexico borderlands have long been an ideal setting for intrigue and illegal dealings—never more so than in the lawless early days of cattle trafficking and trade among the Plains tribes and Comancheros. This book takes us to the borderlands in the 1860s and 1870s for an in-depth look at Union-Confederate skullduggery amid the infamous Comanche-Comanchero trade in stolen Texas livestock. In 1862, the Confederates abandoned New Mexico Territory and Texas west of the Pecos River, fully expecting to return someday. Meanwhile, administered by Union troops under martial law, the region became a hotbed of Rebel exiles and spies, who gathered intelligence, disrupted federal supply lines, and plotted to retake the Southwest. Using a treasure trove of previously unexplored documents, authors James Bailey Blackshear and Glen Sample Ely trace the complicated network of relationships that drew both Texas cattlemen and Comancheros into these borderlands, revealing the urban elite who were heavily involved in both the legal and illegal transactions that fueled the region’s economy. Confederates and Comancheros deftly weaves a complex tale of Texan overreach and New Mexican resistance, explores cattle drives and cattle rustling, and details shady government contracts and bloody frontier justice. Peopled with Rebels and bluecoats, Comanches and Comancheros, Texas cattlemen and New Mexican merchants, opportunistic Indian agents and Anglo arms dealers, this book illustrates how central these contested borderlands were to the history of the American West.
New Mexico Territory attracted outlaws and desperados as its remote locations guaranteed non-detection while providing opportunists the perfect setting in which to seize wealth. Many wicked women on the run from their pasts headed there seeking new starts before and after 1912 statehood. Colorful characters such as Bronco Sue, Sadie Orchard and Lizzie McGrath were noted mavens of mayhem, while many other women were notorious gamblers, bawdy madams or confidence tricksters. Some paid the ultimate price for crimes of passion, while others avoided punishment by slyly using their beguiling allure to influence authorities. Follow the raucous tales of these wild women in a collection that proves crime in early New Mexico wasn't only a boys' game.
A hardboiled valentine to the Golden State, That Left Turn at Albuquerque marks the return of noir master Scott Phillips. Douglas Rigby, attorney-at-law, is bankrupt. He’s just sunk his last $200,000—a clandestine “loan” from his last remaining client, former bigshot TV exec Glenn Haskill—into a cocaine deal gone wrong. The lesson? Never trust anyone else with the dirty work. Desperate to get back on top, Rigby formulates an art forgery scheme involving one of Glenn’s priceless paintings, a victimless crime. But for Rigby to pull this one off, he’ll need to negotiate a whole cast of players with their own agendas, including his wife, his girlfriend, an embittered art forger, Glenn’s resentful nurse, and the man’s money-hungry nephew. One misstep, and it all falls apart—will he be able to save his skin? Written with hard-knock sensibility and wicked humor, Scott Phillips’s newest novel will cement him as one of the great crime writers of the 21st century.
