Download or read book Wrecked Lives and Lost Souls written by Jerry Thompson and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2019-10-24 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Great American Outlaw written by Frank Richard Prassel and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 1996-09-01 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores in depth the origins, development, and prospects of outlawry and of the relationship of outlaws to the social conditions of changing times. Throughout American history you will find larger-than-life brigands in every period and every region. Often, because we hunger for simple justice, we romanticize them to the point of being unable to separate fact from fiction. Frank Richard Prassel brings this home in a thorough and fascinating examination of the concept of outlawry from Robin Hood, Dick Turpin, and Blackbeard through Jean Lafitte, Pancho Villa, and Billy the Kid to more modern personalities such as John Dillinger, Claude Dallas, and D. B. Cooper. A separate chapter on molls, plus equal treatment in the histories of gangs, traces women's involvement in outlaw activities. Prassel covers the folklore as well as the facts, even including an appendix of ballads by and about outlaws. He makes clear how this motley group of bandits, pirates, highwaymen, desperadoes, rebels, hoodlums, renegades, gangsters, and fugitives—who stand tall in myth—wither in the light of truth, but flourish in the movies. As he tells the stories, there is little to confirm that Jesse and Frank James, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the Daltons, Pretty Boy Floyd, Ma Barker, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, Belle Starr, the Apache Kid, or any of the so-called good badmen, did anything that did not enrich or otherwise benefit themselves. But there is plenty of evidence, in the form of slain victims and ruined lives, to show how many ways they caused harm. The Great American Outlaw is as much an excellent survey on the phenomenon as it is a brilliant exposition of the larger than-life figures who created it. Above all, it is a tribute to that aspect of humanity that Americans admire most and that Prassel describes as a willingness "to fight, however hopelessly, against exhibitions of privilege."

Download or read book Please General Custer I Don t Want to Go written by Russell W. Estlack and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-01-24 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These entertaining stories from Old West history include cowboys, Indians, lawmen, lawbreakers, entertainers, prostitutes, priests, and politicians. They all helped shape the myth and legend of the American West. This book reveals the stories of characters like Mary Fields, Cleophas Dowd, and Judge Roy Bean, and offers glimpses of gunfights, holdups, mining claim battles, and more.

Download or read book Outlaws on Horseback written by Harry Sinclair Drago and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Outlaws on Horseback concentrates on the long, unbroken chain of crime that began in the late 1850s with the Missouri-Kansas border warfare and ended in Arkansas in 1921 with the killing of Henry Starr, the last of the authentic desperadoes. Harry Sinclair Drago shows links among the men and women who terrorized the Midwest while he squelches the most outlandish tales about them. The guerrilla warfare led by the evil William Quantrill was training for Frank and Jesse James and Cole and Jim Younger. Drago puts their bloody careers in perspective and tracks down the truth about Belle Starr the Bandit Queen, Cherokee Bill, Rose of the Cimarron, and the gangs, including the Daltons and Doolins, that infested the Oklahoma hills. The action moves from the sacking of Lawrence to the raid on Northfield to the shootout at Coffeyville.

Download or read book Death of an Era written by Andrew E. Long and published by Balboa Press. This book was released on 2017-07-24 with total page 596 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: His life, from humble beginnings as an Oklahoma farmboy to a multi-millionaire real estate developer.

Download or read book Pretty Boy The Life and Times of Charles Arthur Floyd written by Michael Wallis and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2011-07-18 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This engaging biography exactly and vividly catches the tone of a region, a time, and a man."—Larry McMurtry From the best-selling author of Billy the Kid and Route 66, a true-life story of a notorious outlaw that magnificently re-creates the vanished, impoverished world of Dust Bowl America. Michael Wallis evokes the hard times of the era as he follows the life of Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd from his coming of age, when there were no jobs and no food, to his descent into a life of petty crime, bootlegging, murder, and prison. Before long he was one of the FBI's original "public enemies." After a series of spectacular bank robberies he was slain in an Ohio field in 1934 at the age of thirty. Pretty Boy is social history at its best, portraying, with a sweeping style, the larger story of the hardscrabble farmers whose lives were so intolerably shattered by the Depression.

Download or read book Lost Sounds written by Tim Brooks and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking history of African Americans in the early recording industry, Lost Sounds examines the first three decades of sound recording in the United States, charting the surprising roles black artists played in the period leading up to the Jazz Age and the remarkably wide range of black music and culture they preserved. Drawing on more than thirty years of scholarship, Tim Brooks identifies key black recording artists and profiles forty audio pioneers. Brooks assesses the careers and recordings of George W. Johnson, Bert Williams, George Walker, Noble Sissle, Eubie Blake, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, W. C. Handy, James Reese Europe, Wilbur Sweatman, Harry T. Burleigh, Roland Hayes, Booker T. Washington, and boxing champion Jack Johnson, plus a host of lesser-known voices. Many of these pioneers struggled to be heard in an era of rampant discrimination. Their stories detail the forces––black and white––that gradually allowed African Americans to enter the mainstream entertainment industry. Lost Sounds includes Brooks's selected discography of CD reissues and an appendix by Dick Spottswood describing early recordings by black artists in the Caribbean and South America.

Download or read book Stoking the Fire written by Kirby Brown and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The years between Oklahoma statehood in 1907 and the 1971 reemergence of the Cherokee Nation are often seen as an intellectual, political, and literary “dark age” in Cherokee history. In Stoking the Fire, Kirby Brown brings to light a rich array of writing that counters this view. A critical reading of the work of several twentieth-century Cherokee writers, this book reveals the complicated ways their writings reimagined, enacted, and bore witness to Cherokee nationhood in the absence of a functioning Cherokee state. Historian Rachel Caroline Eaton (1869–1938), novelist John Milton Oskison (1874–1947), educator Ruth Muskrat Bronson (1897–1982), and playwright Rollie Lynn Riggs (1899–1954) are among the writers Brown considers within the Cherokee national and transnational contexts that informed their lives and work. Facing the devastating effects on Cherokee communities of allotment and assimilation policies that ultimately dissolved the Cherokee government, these writers turned to tribal histories and biographies, novels and plays, and editorials and public addresses as alternative sites for resistance, critique, and the ongoing cultivation of Cherokee nationhood. Stoking the Fire shows how these writers—through fiction, drama, historiography, or Cherokee diplomacy—inscribed a Cherokee national presence in the twentieth century within popular and academic discourses that have often understood the “Indian nation” as a contradiction in terms. Avoiding the pitfalls of both assimilationist resignation and accommodationist ambivalence, Stoking the Fire recovers this period as a rich archive of Cherokee national memory. More broadly, the book expands how we think today about Indigenous nationhood and identity, our relationships with writers and texts from previous eras, and the paradigms that shape the fields of American Indian and Indigenous studies.

Download or read book Ozark Country written by Otto Ernest Rayburn and published by University of Arkansas Press. This book was released on 2021-03-01 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published just days before America’s entry into World War II, Ozark Country is Otto Ernest Rayburn’s love letter to his adopted region. One of several chronicles of the Ozarks that garnered national attention during the Depression and war years, when many Americans craved stories about people and places seemingly untouched by the difficulties of the times, Rayburn’s colorful tour takes readers from the fictional village of Woodville into the backcountry of a region teeming with storytellers, ballad singers, superstitions, and home remedies. Rayburn’s tales—fantastical, fun, and unapologetically romantic—portray a world that had already nearly disappeared by the time they were written. Yet Rayburn’s depiction of the Ozarks resonates with notions of the region that have persisted in the American consciousness ever since.

Download or read book Oklahoma Scoundrels written by Robert Barr Smith and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2016-11-07 with total page 111 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early Oklahoma was a haven for violent outlaws and a death trap for deputy U.S. marshals. The infamous Doolin gang's OK Hotel gunfight left five dead. Killers like Bible-quoting choir leader Deacon Jim Miller wreaked havoc. Gunslinger femme fatale Belle Starr specialized in horse theft. Wannabe outlaws like Al Jennings traded train robbing for politics and Hollywood films. And Elmer McCurdy's determination and inept skill earned him a carnival slot and the nickname "the Bandit Who Wouldn't Give Up." Historians Robert Barr Smith and Laurence J. Yadon dispel myths surrounding some of the most significant lawbreakers in Sooner history.

Download or read book The Harlem Renaissance in the American West written by Cary D Wintz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-05-22 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Harlem Renaissance, an exciting period in the social and cultural history of the US, has over the past few decades re-established itself as a watershed moment in African American history. However, many of the African American communities outside the urban center of Harlem that participated in the Harlem Renaissance between 1914 and 1940, have been overlooked and neglected as locations of scholarship and research. Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negro's Western Experience will change the way students and scholars of the Harlem Renaissance view the efforts of artists, musicians, playwrights, club owners, and various other players in African American communities all over the American West to participate fully in the cultural renaissance that took hold during that time.

Download or read book A Biographical Dictionary of Silent Film Western Actors and Actresses written by George A. Katchmer and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-05-20 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long before sound became an essential part of motion pictures, Westerns were an established genre. The men and women who brought to life cowboys, cowgirls, villains, sidekicks, distressed damsels and outraged townspeople often continued with their film careers, finding success and fame well into the sound era--always knowing that it was in silent Westerns that their careers began. More than a thousand of these once-silent Western players are featured in this fully indexed encyclopedic work. Each entry includes a detailed biography, covering both personal and professional milestones and a complete Western filmography. A foreword is supplied by Diana Serra Cary (formerly the child star "Baby Peggy"), who performed with many of the actors herein.

Download or read book The Illustrated Route 66 Historical Atlas written by Jim Hinckley and published by Voyageur Press. This book was released on 2014-10-21 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A look at 500 of Route 66's most significant past and present sites in seven categories, illustrated with hundreds of photographs and specially commissioned maps"--

Download or read book The Gunning of America written by Pamela Haag and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2016-04-19 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans have always loved guns. This special bond was forged during the American Revolution and sanctified by the Second Amendment. It is because of this exceptional relationship that American civilians are more heavily armed than the citizens of any other nation. Or so we're told. In The Gunning of America, historian Pamela Haag overturns this conventional wisdom. American gun culture, she argues, developed not because the gun was exceptional, but precisely because it was not: guns proliferated in America because throughout most of the nation's history, they were perceived as an unexceptional commodity, no different than buttons or typewriters. Focusing on the history of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, one of the most iconic arms manufacturers in America, Haag challenges many basic assumptions of how and when America became a gun culture. Under the leadership of Oliver Winchester and his heirs, the company used aggressive, sometimes ingenious sales and marketing techniques to create new markets for their product. Guns have never "sold themselves"; rather, through advertising and innovative distribution campaigns, the gun industry did. Through the meticulous examination of gun industry archives, Haag challenges the myth of a primal bond between Americans and their firearms. Over the course of its 150 year history, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company sold over 8 million guns. But Oliver Winchester-a shirtmaker in his previous career-had no apparent qualms about a life spent arming America. His daughter-in-law Sarah Winchester was a different story. Legend holds that Sarah was haunted by what she considered a vast blood fortune, and became convinced that the ghosts of rifle victims were haunting her. She channeled much of her inheritance, and her conflicted conscience, into a monstrous estate now known as the Winchester Mystery House, where she sought refuge from this ever-expanding army of phantoms. In this provocative and deeply-researched work of narrative history, Haag fundamentally revises the history of arms in America, and in so doing explodes the clichéthat have created and sustained our lethal gun culture.

Download or read book Japanese Russian Relations Under Gorbachev and Yeltsin written by Hiroshi Kimura and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-08 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why has the stalemate in Japanese-Russian relations persisted through the end of the Cold War and Moscow's weakening control over its far eastern territories? In this volume Kimura continues his comprehensive analysis of Russia and Japan's strained and unstable relations to the present day.

Download or read book The Encyclopedia of High tech Crime and Crime fighting written by Michael Newton and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2003 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of crime in American has proven that criminals are often the first to seize upon opportunities presented by new technologies and use them for nefarious purposes. It has also demonstrated that law enforcement groups are quick to respond and use high-tech tools to defend the public safety. This is more true than ever

Download or read book OUTLAWS TALES OF BAD GUYS WHO SHAPED TH written by Robert Barr Smith and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The people who pushed west were mostly ordinary folks, the guts of the young United States, tough, ambitious, hardworking, and anxious to leave the world better for their kids than it had been for them. Those who did not come of that hardy stock did not last. With them came the trouble-makers, to everybody’s sorrow. Some of them were already running from the law someplace else. Others were simply dishonest, looking for a time and place to blossom into full-blown hoodlums. Some of the young people emulated them: there was some illusory swagger in being a hoodlum, witness the nicknames they carried around . . . many of which they had invented themselves, a sort of phony glory. This collection of short, action-filled stories of the Old West’s most egregiously bad bad guys caught in the act of mayhem, distraction, murder, and highway robbery, includes famous names like the Dalton gang, lesser known bandits like Kaiser Bill Goodman, and many more. The book will include archival illustrations and photographs of the shady characters and the scenes of their crimes.