When the West was young

The writer is indebted for the material in this book to a goodly number of the old-timers, from whose lips came much of which is written in the following pages, and to numerous...

Meantime the Jayhawkers were pressing hard across the gleaming plain. The surface of that plain was white as snow, as level as a floor. It was so hard that the wheels left no tr...

During the first year, while organization was being perfected, Joaquin Murieta traveled through northern California with Rosita gathering recruits, establishing alliances among...

In Hornitas he sought out a Mexican who had notified a posse of his presence in the neighborhood, shot him down at broad noonday on the main street, and galloped away with the p...

The chase had begun with the beginning of the day, at Dragoon Pass. What bloodshed had preceded it is not known. But Shea and his companions were following a hot trail, eager fo...

Now as they drove on they kept constant lookout and their rifles were nearly always in their hands. Every morning they rose long before the dawn, and two of them would climb the...

Three miles outside of Tombstone stood an adobe building wherein a venturesome saloon-keeper had installed himself, a barrel of that remarkable whisky known as "Kill Me Quick,"...

When they were not leading their followers in some raid against the herds of border cattlemen, or lying in wait to ambush one of the armed bands of smugglers, or standing up the...

McLowery's sullenness seemed to have been contagious and there were no good-nights said to the guest. He knew every man in the room; some of them he had known ever since that ev...

It has been told in another of these tales how Galeyville was the bad men's metropolis, headquarters for all the rustlers and stage-robbers of Cochise County; how the place enjo...

So it came that the knowledge of his killings spread abroad; men told how he had slain one victim who was drinking in a dance-hall when the bullet entered his back; how another...

For he brought more than Texas cattle into this land which had heretofore been the hunting-ground of Apaches, the wild refuge of white renegades more savage than the Indians. Wh...

Things had reached a pass where a vigilance committee appeared to be the appropriate climax. But that was not John Slaughter's way; if any one were going to take the power of th...

That was the way he put it to Captain Thomas Jonathan Jeffords, to whom he also confessed the weakness which had overcome him in the case of the tortured Mexican. And the knowle...

The idea was that each man must draw his bean, and he who got a white one lived, while he who picked a black kernel was lined up with his luckless friends before the nearest wal...

There was a driver by the name of Tingley on the Prescott line who had the run between Wickenburg and La Paz back in 1869. He had seen much Indian-fighting and was sufficiently...

Swarms and swarms of them, stripped to the waist, befeathered, trousered in tightly fitting buckskin, they were defying all the laws of gravitation by the manner in which every...

There were six passengers in the coach, all of them old-timers in the West. And they were known as the Free Thompson party, from the name of the leader. Every one of these men w...

A little group of lean-faced men were crouching on the flat roof of the large out-building. The most of them were clad in fringed garments of buckskin; here and there was one in...

This swarthy black-haired one in the soft silk shirt and spotless raiment of the gambler is Cherokee Bob, who killed and plundered unchallenged throughout eastern Washington and...