In the early 1890s Wyoming's northern rangeland was torn by the Johnson County War, a violent western collision that pitted cattle barons and powerful politicians against homesteaders and rustlers. The range war, riddled with lynchings, ambushes, and an invasion by Texas hired gunmen, culminated in a valiant last stand and siege involving hundreds of combatants. These explosive events have captivated novelists, filmmakers, and historians for more than a century, inspiring such classics as "The Virginian" and "Shane." "The Johnson County War" is the first comprehensive historical account of the range war in nearly four decades. Western historian Bill O'Neal has reexamined familiar sources and explored new information, while visiting sites from Hole-in-the-Wall to the famous TA Ranch. Lavishly illustrated, "The Johnson County War" is a fresh account of a major frontier conflict.

Although only a cook, Doris Miller fought bravely against Japanese attackers at Pearl Harbor. The young African-American from Texas was one of the first sailors to earn the Navy Cross during World War II, and the first African-American. He became a hero to the country and a proud icon for the African-American community and the war effort in general. Despite his notoriety and accolades, Miller returned to combat and was killed in action. This is the story of his heroic life from one of the top non-fiction writers in the West. From his boyhood in Waco, Texas, to his death in the Pacific, Bill O'Neal tells the tale of a World War II hero.

Much information (some of it factual, a lot of it fictional) is available about the famous gunfighters of the Old West - the Jameses, Billy the Kid, Wild Bill Hickok, Wyatt Earp, John Wesley Hardin, and that latter-day folk idol, Butch Cassidy. Dozens of less-well-known but sometimes even more murderous gunslingers - such men as Cullen Baker, Harvey Logan, Longhaired Jim Courtright, and Mysterious Dave Mather - have received only scant mention in scattered accounts.This encyclopedia - a who's who of the gunfighting West-provides a compilation of facts, sifted myths, folklore, and outright lies, about the lives and deaths of 255 men, both the famous and the all but forgotten. Also included are detailed accounts of the almost six hundred gunfights the men took part in, mostly between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the century. Each entry follows a concise and useful format: an alphabetical listing of the gunman; nicknames or aliases; dates and places of birth and death, is known; the occupations the man pursued; a brief biography; and, in chronological order, accounts of the verified gunfights in which he participated. In the Introduction, from the information he amassed in this volume, Bill O'Neal provides a fascinating summary of the data and offers new insights into the nature of the western gunmen and of the feuds and fights that bloodied the West. For example, he relates how a large number of the gunfighters used guns as tools of their trades, legitimate and otherwise - lawmen and detectives, buffalo hunters, army scouts, thieves, hired killers, and the like. Of the gunfighters included here 108 served as law officers at some time in their careers. The average lifespan, including those who died of natural causes, was forty-seven years, and more than 50 percent of the gunmen died from gunshot wounds. Encyclopedia of Western Gunfighters offers a unique compilation of information about these men - a comprehensive and reliable source.

The Wild West thrived for more than two decades in Caldwell, Kansas. Throughout the 1870s Caldwell was a lawless, unincorporated village astride the storied Chisholm Trail. Located just north of the Kansas state line, the "Border Queen" was the first semblance of a town seen by drovers after long weeks of shoving their herds through Indian Territory. The raucous trail town offered whiskey and women to legions of dusty cowboys, while inevitably becoming the site of shootouts and lynchings.

For nearly a century the world's most famous law enforcement body has inspired novelists, actors and filmmakers. From "The Lone Ranger" to "Walker, Texas Ranger," from Zane Grey's "The Lone Star Ranger" to Larry McMurtry's "Lonesome Dove," Texas Rangers have been portrayed on the silver screen, network radio and television. John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Tom Mix, Clint Eastwood, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and a host of lesser Western stars each took his turn at depicting Texas Rangers. Decade by decade, movie by movies, "Reel Rangers" explores in detail rich popular that has dramatized the heroic mystique of the Texas Rangers.

The story of the formative period of Cheyenne is, to a remarkable degree, the story of America's last West. Founded as a railroad boomtown, Cheyenne was a raucous and violent Hell on Wheels. Rising as if by magic from an empty prairie, Cheyenne was known the ?Magic City? of the Plains. The cast of this great Western saga was colorful and imposing. Cattle barons and merchant kings. Cowboys and soldiers. Vigilantes and lawmen. Gamblers and gunfighters. The railroad brought to Cheyenne a parade of celebrities, from President Grant to Teddy Roosevelt, Wild Bill Hickok to Calamity Jane, Sarah Bernhardt to Buffalo Bill Cody. And Cheyenne was built and nurtured by such powerhouse urban pioneers as F.E. Warren and Joseph W. Carey. The Magic City was a classic product of the urban frontier.

More than 250 on-site photographs illustrate this tour of homes of many of the Lone Star State's most powerful political leaders. From the Governor's Mansion in Austin to the Texas White House near Johnson City, from Sam Houston's ?Wigwam? in Huntsville to the Eisenhower birthplace in Denison, almost a score of homes of Texas governors and presidents are open to the public. Two fine Victorian residences which once were governors? homes now are B&Bs, in Galveston and Weatherford. Another three dozen houses, while privately owned today, may be viewed when driving through homestowns from Lubbock to LaPorte, from Uvalde to Haskell. This travel book provides directions to these houses, as well as photos and stories of the men and women and their families who brought life to these plantation homes, log cabins, ranch houses, and mansions.

From the 1870s until the 1920s cattlemen and sheepmen clashed bitterly for rangeland in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming. During five decades of irregular but vicious warfare, scores of attacks were launched by cattlemen, at least twenty-eight sheepmen and sixteen cowboys were killed, and more than 53,000 sheep were shot, clubbed, knifed, poisoned, dynamited and rimrocked. There were 120 raids and skirmishes across the west, including famous events such as the Pleasant Valley War, the murder of Willie Nickell, the Diamondfield Jack trial and the brutal Ten Sleep tragedy, and involving gunfighters Tom Horn and Commodore Perry Owens, cattle baron Charles Goodnight, and other frontier notables. Bill O'Neal is one of the country's top Western historians.