Henry Starr was one of the most notorious criminals of the Old West, famed far and wide for robbing two banks in the same town at the same time—a feat even the Dalton Gang couldn’t pull off. Still, Henry Starr was a reluctant outlaw. An honest, hardworking seventeen-year-old Cherokee cowboy with a steady job and a steady girl, he was framed and arrested for a crime he didn’t commit. When he was falsely accused and convicted a second time, Starr figured that since he was branded a criminal, he might as well become one—and proceeded to make himself one of the most wanted men in the West. “If I’m going to have the name of a criminal, I might as well have the game,” he declared as he embarked on his life of crime. By the time he was through, he was said to have robbed more banks than any other man in history. From Henry Starr’s initiation as an outlaw, to a death sentence handed down by “Hanging Judge” Parker, to his final days playing the bad guy in Hollywood movies, The Saga of Henry Starr is a colorful retelling of a true Western legend.
The Routledge Handbook of North American Indigenous Modernisms provides a powerful suite of innovative contributions by both leading thinkers and emerging scholars in the field. Incorporating an international scope of essays, this volume reaches beyond traditional national or euroamerican boundaries to locate North American Indigenous modernities and modernisms in a hemispheric context. Covering key theoretical approaches and topics, this volume includes: Diverse explorations of Indigenous cultural and intellectual production in treatments of dance, poetry, vaudeville, autobiography, radio, cinema, and more Investigation of how we think about Indigenous lives, literatures, and cultural productions in North America from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Surveys of critical geographies of Indigenous literary and cultural studies, including refocused and reframed exploration of the diverse cultures, knowledges, traditions, geographies, experiences, and formal innovations that inform Indigenous literary, intellectual, and cultural productions The Routledge Handbook of North American Indigenous Modernisms presents fresh insight to modernist studies, acknowledging and reconciling the occluded histories of Indigenous erasure, and inviting both students and scholars to expand their understanding of the field.
Wild West lore collides with a life of crime in this biographical novel of the legendary Cherokee outlaw. Growing up on Indian Territory in Oklahoma, Henry Starr had an illustrious family lineage: half Cherokee warriors, half western outlaws. Inspired by dime-store novels and old family tales, he began robbing banks to avenge the bitter mistreatment of his people. But while Starr’s criminal career soon made him a legend, it also won him a death sentence. That was years ago, before a lucky twist of fate set Henry free. But while the world has changed around him, the myth of the outlaw Henry Starr lives on. Now his best chance at a new life is to work in Hollywood—depicting his former self in silent films. As Henry is drawn into a glamorized version of his own past, it becomes difficult to separate truth from fiction. And he soon finds himself returning to the life that made him a notorious icon. A fictionalized tale of Henry Starr’s dramatic life, novelist and historian Richard Slotkin brings authentic period detail to this saga of the frontier.
The Sac River flowed gently through the valley, circling Aldrich on the west. The author accompanied by his father, came from the city to make his home with Sara Dickerson. Charles, being ten-years old upon his arrival in Aldrich, would live with his grandmother until 1939, when he graduated from high school. The last frontier had passed in 1890. The population was about 120 million people. The stock market had crashed in 1929, and the U.S. was facing a major depression. The Aldrich Saga is set in a Bible-belt village of varied people; religious zealots, political pundits, town drunks, and all of the other kind that inhabit, including the church-going folk. It wsa the author's eight years with Sara that he was privy to so many pleasant stories, events and happenings. Halloween was celebrated with gusto in Aldrich, and the different personalities made news. There were the visiting Gypsies, the politikin of the town loafers, and the certain pseudo-intellaectuals who would trash Franklin Roosevelt, and make dire predicitons about Hitler being the Anti-Christ. Two misers in Polk County engendered much conversation. Medicine shows, drumming their wares in bottles that were suspect, brought laughs. There were the old gentlemen telling of their exploits in the Civil War, followed by WWI veterans who also got out their message. Clarence Alden was a superb ventriloquist that nearly scared a man to death by throwing his voice into a coffin that was being unloaded by men at the Springfield Frisco Station. The words of Solomon are interesting for people unfamiliar with him. The author being an ex-teacher presents his views on politics. Then, there is the snow bound train in 1918 that foundered on the way to Kansas City, as told by Ralph Dickerson. The story of the Aldrich Bank being robbed is told by the infamous Henry Star in 1908. The author remembers Granny's copper wire, the only dishonesty I can remember her committing, to keep the light bill to the one dollar minimum. Ralph Dickerson caught the Spanish Flu, which killed twenty three million people. Sara, with her mysterious medicines, cured him. There is also the story of Bill Akard, a world champion shooter, who had put on shooting exhibitions for the King of England and the Russian Czar, and who persuaded Henry Starr not to rob the bank. For many years the Aldrich village has been gone with the winds.
"Chasing the Sun" is a guide to Western fiction with more than 1,350 entries, including 59 reviews of the author's personal favorites, organized around theme.
The 13th edition of the International Who's Who in Poetry is a unique and comprehensive guide to the leading lights and freshest talent in poetry today. Containing biographies of more than 4,000 contemporary poets world-wide, this essential reference work provides truly international coverage. In addition to the well known poets, talented up-and-coming writers are also profiled. Contents: * Each entry provides full career history and publication details * An international appendices section lists prizes and past prize-winners, organizations, magazines and publishers * A summary of poetic forms and rhyme schemes * The career profile section is supplemented by lists of Poets Laureate, Oxford University professors of poetry, poet winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, winners of the Pulitzer Prize for American Poetry and of the King's/Queen's Gold medal and other poetry prizes.
Growing up, Jerry Thompson knew only that his grandfather was a gritty, “mixed-blood” Cherokee cowboy named Joe Lynch Davis. That was all anyone cared to say about the man. But after Thompson’s mother died, the award-winning historian discovered a shoebox full of letters that held the key to a long-lost family history of passion, violence, and despair. Wrecked Lives and Lost Souls, the result of Thompson’s sleuthing into his family’s past, uncovers the lawless life and times of a man at the center of systematic cattle rustling, feuding, gun battles, a bloody range war, bank robberies, and train heists in early 1900s Indian Territory and Oklahoma. Through painstaking detective work into archival sources, newspaper accounts, and court proceedings, and via numerous interviews, Thompson pieces together not only the story of his grandfather—and a long-forgotten gang of outlaws to rival the infamous Younger brothers—but also the dark path of a Cherokee diaspora from Georgia to Indian Territory. Davis, born in 1891, grew up on a family ranch on the Canadian River, outside the small community of Porum in the Cherokee Nation. The range was being fenced, and for the Davis family and others, cattle rustling was part of a way of life—a habit that ultimately spilled over into violence and murder. The story “goes way back to the wild & wooly cattle days of the west,” an aunt wrote to Thompson’s mother, “when there was cattle rustling, bank robberies & feuding.” One of these feuds—that Joe Davis was “raised right into”—was the decade-long Porum Range War, which culminated in the murder of Davis’s uncle in 1907. In fleshing out the details of the range war and his grandfather’s life, Thompson brings to light the brutality and far-reaching consequences of an obscure chapter in the history of the American West.
In "Muting White Noise," James H. Cox considers how Native authors have liberated our imaginations from colonial narratives. Cox takes his title from Sherman Alexie, for whom the white noise of a television set represents the white mass-produced culture that mutes American Indian voices. Cox foregrounds the work of Native intellectuals in his readings of the American Indian novel tradition. He thereby develops a critical perspective from which to re-see the role played by the Euro-American novel tradition in justifying and enabling colonialism.
