Desert Lawmen

Elected for two-year terms, frontier sheriffs were the principal peace-keepers in counties that were often larger than New England states. As officers of the court, they defended settlers and protected their property from the ever-present violence on the frontier. Their duties ranged from tracking down stagecoach robbers and serving court warrants to locking up drunks and quelling domestic disputes.The reality of their job embraced such mandane duties as being jail keepers, tax collectors, quarantine inspectors, court-appointed executioners, and dogcatchers.

An historical survey of frontier lawmen in territorial New Mexico and Arizona reveals that sheriffs were generally elected to four year terms, defended settlers and protected their property from violence, and performed other duties ranging from tracking down stagecoach robbers and serving court warrants to locking up drunks and quelling domestic disputes.

Standoffs, saloons, and sunsets spring to mind when one envisions the rough and tumble early days of the American frontier.

The pathbreaking classic on law enforcement on the frontier of the American West.

In the late nineteenth century Tom Ketchum and his brother Sam formed the Ketchum Gang with other outlaws and became successful train robbers. In their day, these men were the most daring of their kind, and the most feared. Eventually Tom Ketchum was caught and sentenced to death for attempting to hold up a railway train. He became the first individual--and the last--ever to be executed for a crime of this sort. Jeffrey Burton has been researching the story of the Ketchum Gang for more than forty years. He sorts fact from fiction to provide the definitive truth about Ketchum and numerous other outlaws, including Will Carver and Butch Cassidy. The Deadliest Outlaws initially was published in a limited run of one hundred paperback copies in England. This second edition in hardcover contains additional material and photographs not found in the earlier printing.

In 1890, the U.S. government declared the frontier settled, and the "Wild West" was history. In the territory of New Mexico, however, crime still knew no limit and the gun was the final answer to all problems. Aiming to help New Mexico achieve statehood, its leaders decided they needed a mounted police force like those that had tamed Texas and Arizona. This book describes the birth of the New Mexico Mounted Police in 1905 and tells the stories of the members of the original Mounties, starting with their first captain, John F. Fullerton. Information drawn from personal interviews with ranger family members (many of whom provided photographs), Fullerton's personal papers and official Mounted Police records brings a wealth of detail to this story from New Mexico's rich history. Fred Lambert, the last surviving member of the territorial rangers, provides a foreword.

Think gunfighter, and Wyatt Earp or Billy the Kid may come to mind, but what of Jim Moon? Joel Fowler? Zack Light? A host of other figures helped forge the gunfighter persona, but their stories have been lost to time. In a sequel to his Deadly Dozen, celebrated western historian Robert K. DeArment now offers more biographical portraits of lesser-known gunfighters—men who perhaps weren’t glorified in legend or song, but who were rightfully notorious in their day. DeArment has tracked down stories of gunmen from throughout the West—characters you won’t find in any of today’s western history encyclopedias but whose careers are colorfully described here. Photos of the men and telling quotations from primary sources make these characters come alive. In giving these men their due, DeArment takes readers back to the gunfighter culture spawned in part by the upheavals of the Civil War, to a time when deadly duels were part of the social fabric of frontier towns and the Code of the West was real. His vignettes offer telling insights into conditions on the frontier that created the gunfighters of legend. These overlooked shooters never won national headlines but made their own contributions to the blood and thunder of the Old West: people less than legends, but all the more fascinating because they were real. Readers who enjoyed DeArment’s Deadly Dozen will find this book equally captivating—as gripping as a showdown, twelve times over.

Cracking in the desert heat, the sleepy town of Twentynine Palms sits outside the bright blankness that is the sprawl of Los Angeles. For someone on the run like Jack Baylor, who needs a quick exit out of L.A. after a steamy affair with his best friend's wife, Twentynine Palms is the perfect refuge. Standing on the balcony of room 203 at Rancho del Dorotea, Jack plans to lay low for a few days, relax, and enjoy the high desert and the pool. But Jack's best friend, Tory, is already following his trail up Highway 61, and he wants nothing but revenge. Before Jack has a chance to plan his next move, a family disappears from the motel, leaving behind the signs of a gruesome struggle. In the eyes of the Twentynine Palms police, Jack is the only logical suspect. Now Jack has to clear his name and escape his angry best friend. With the unexpected help of a 14–year–old girl, Jack desperately works to evade the police and Tory before his world comes entirely unhinged. With feverish Southern California as the backdrop, Twentynine Palms is a sun–soaked, skittering race toward a surprising truth.

American violence is schizophrenic. On the one hand, many Americans support the creation of a powerful bureaucracy of coercion made up of police and military forces in order to provide public security. At the same time, many of those citizens also demand the private right to protect their own families, home, and property. This book diagnoses this schizophrenia as a product of a distinctive institutional history, in which private forms of violence - vigilantes, private detectives, mercenary gunfighters - emerged in concert with the creation of new public and state forms of violence such as police departments or the National Guard. This dual public and private face of American violence resulted from the upending of a tradition of republican governance, in which public security had been indistinguishable from private effort, by the nineteenth-century social transformations of the Civil War and the Market Revolution.

Celebrated accounts of lawless towns that relied on the extra-legal justice of armed citizens and hired gunmen are part of the enduring cultural legacy of the American West. This work presents a case study of law and legal culture in Lincoln County, Nebraska, during the nineteenth century. It also examines legal institutions on the Great Plains.