In 1948 a childhood friend of Billy the Kid claimed Billy was still living and led investigators to a man in Texas known as William H. “Brushy Bill” Roberts. After initially denying it, Brushy finally agreed to confess his identity on the condition the investigator would help him obtain a pardon so he could die a free man. Over the course of several months Mr. Roberts provided many astounding proofs that he was the Kid of legend, including physical evidence and firsthand knowledge of many obscure aspects of the Kid’s life. In addition, the investigator assisted Roberts with finding living acquaintances of Billy the Kid who signed sworn affidavits stating Roberts was the man they knew. Now after more than 50 years Brushy’s original story is available for the first time ever in paperback.

Alias Billy the Kid

Biographies & Memoirs

Sonnichsen, C.L.

Morrison, William V.

Historical

Creative Texts Publishers, LLC

The feuds raging in Texas in the nineteenth century bound in acrimony not only families but special-interest groups that, feeling intolerably wronged, sought "extralegal justice" when they believed the law would give them no satisfaction. In I’ll Die Before I’ll Run the prominent historian C. L. Sonnichsen leaves no doubt that bad blood so often turned into bloody feuds in Texas because there the folk law of the frontier was reinforced by the unwritten code of honor of the South, and because everybody in Texas went armed. Although the Regulators and Moderators warred in eastern Texas in the 1840s, the really big feuds were ignited by the Civil War and flamed until late in the century, when the Texas Rangers began to put them out. In rich circumstantial detail Sonnichsen describes the most famous of the conflagrations stretching from the "sorrowful sixties" to the "nervous nineties."

I'll Die Before I'll Run: The Story of the Great Feuds of Texas

History

Americas

University Of Nebraska Press

Writing and yellow stains on first page.

Roy Bean: Law West of the Pecos

Outlaw Bill Mitchell Alias Baldy Russell: His Life and Times SIGNED COPY

Outlaw: Bill Mitchell, Alias Baldy Russell - His Life and Times

Allan Swallow

Outlaw: On the Dodge With Baldy Russell

Swallow Pr

Without humor, the American West would be a vast territory of arid clichés — stolid cowboys and fearless lawmen, or, in more modern visions, dastardly land developers and fanatical environmentalists — all of them as lifeless as an alkalai flat. In The Laughing West, Professor C. L. Sonnichsen presents a generous selection of humorous western writing and shows how the humorous perspective comes closer to the truth about the west than either the romance of the “old West” or the sometimes bitter anti-romanticism of the new west. As Leslie Fiedler has observed, “to understand the West as somehow a joke comes a little closer to getter it straight.”The Laughing West consists of twenty-one pieces of humorous western writing, along with a general introduction, section introductions and an afterword. Throughout the book, the humor is based on character, and on how our perception of the familiar character types has evolved over the years. The reader is treated to a gallery of western originals: from the practical joker Slewfoot Samuels in Bill Gulick’s “The Marriage of Moon Wind,” to Eddie Bud Boyd, the fast-talking cattle broker in Glendon Swarthout’s The Cadillac Cowboys; from the Texas A&M-educated Sheriff “Freight Train” Flowers in Peeper by William Brinkley, to the brilliantly devious Governor Cullie Blanton in The One-Eyed Man by Larry L. King.In addition to the traditional cowboys, Indians, and Mexicans, The Laughing West shows some contemporary western faces: the new breed of lawman, the rootless pilgrim, and the new urban westerner, typified by “Slick,” in Dan Jenkins’ Baja Oklahoma complaining about the “Chateau-le-44.50” in the poshest restaurant in a Dallas shopping mall.

The Laughing West: Humorous Western Fiction, Past and Present

Literature & Fiction

Sonnichsen, Charles L.

Humor & Satire

SWALLOW PRESS+

Without humor, the American West would be a vast territory of arid clichés — stolid cowboys and fearless lawmen, or, in more modern visions, dastardly land developers and fanatical environmentalists — all of them as lifeless as an alkalai flat. In The Laughing West, Professor C. L. Sonnichsen presents a generous selection of humorous western writing and shows how the humorous perspective comes closer to the truth about the west than either the romance of the “old West” or the sometimes bitter anti-romanticism of the new west. As Leslie Fiedler has observed, “to understand the West as somehow a joke comes a little closer to getter it straight.” The Laughing West consists of twenty-one pieces of humorous western writing, along with a general introduction, section introductions and an afterword. Throughout the book, the humor is based on character, and on how our perception of the familiar character types has evolved over the years. The reader is treated to a gallery of western originals: from the practical joker Slewfoot Samuels in Bill Gulick’s “The Marriage of Moon Wind,” to Eddie Bud Boyd, the fast-talking cattle broker in Glendon Swarthout’s The Cadillac Cowboys; from the Texas A&amp;M-educated Sheriff “Freight Train” Flowers in Peeper by William Brinkley, to the brilliantly devious Governor Cullie Blanton in The One-Eyed Man by Larry L. King. In addition to the traditional cowboys, Indians, and Mexicans, The Laughing West shows some contemporary western faces: the new breed of lawman, the rootless pilgrim, and the new urban westerner, typified by “Slick,” in Dan Jenkins’ Baja Oklahoma complaining about the “Chateau-le-44.50” in the poshest restaurant in a Dallas shopping mall.

The Laughing West: Humorous Western Fiction, Past and Present (Humorous Western Fiction, Past and Present: An Anthology)

Frederick Webb Hodge remarked that the Eastern Apache tribe called the Mescaleros were “never regarded as so warlike” as the Apaches of Arizona. But the Mescaleros’ history is one of hardship and oppression alternating with wars of revenge. They were friendly to the Spaniards until victimized, and friendly to Americans until they were betrayed again. For three hundred years Mescaleros fought the Spaniards and Mexicans. They fought Americans for forty more, before subsiding into lethargy and discouragement. Only since 1930 have the Mescaleros been able to make tribal progress. C. L. Sonnichsen tells the story of the Mescalero Apaches from the earliest records to the modern day, from the Indian's point of view. In early days the Mescaleros moved about freely. Their principal range was between the Río Grande and the Pecos in New Mexico, but they hunted into the Staked Plains and southward into Mexico. They owned nothing and everything. Today the Mescaleros are American citizens and own their reservation in the Tularosa country of New Mexico. While the Mescalero Apaches still struggle to retain their traditions and bridge the gap between their old life and the new, their people have made amazing progress.

The Mescalero Apaches (Volume 51) (The Civilization of the American Indian Series)

University of Oklahoma Press

The Ambidextrous Historian: Historical Writers and Writing in the American West

"Tucson is the first comprehensive history of a unique corner of America, a city with its roots in Indian and Spanish colonial history. . .C. L. Sonnichsen, dean of southwestern historians--chronicles with humor and affection the growth over two centuries of one of the region's most colorful communities."

Tucson: The Life and Times of an American City

Univ of Oklahoma Pr

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Books by Sonnichsen, C.L.