Called "King of the Oklahoma Outlaws" by Marshal Bill Tilghman, Bill Doolin first served an apprenticeship as a member of the Dalton gang. Wisely avoiding the gang's fiasco at Coffeyville, Doolin formed his own gang in 1892, and for the next four years these wild characters robbed trains, looted banks, and otherwise thumbed their noses at harassed U.S. marshals. By the time Doolin was ambushed and killed by a heavy shotgun blast, his escapades were providing rich material for the legends that flourish today about the man and his activities.

Bill Doolin was perhaps the last great American outlaw of the nineteenth century. Once part of the Doolin-Dalton gang, he rode and robbed in the wild Indian Territory that would become Oklahoma. The Daltons were eventually shot to ribbons in their failed attempt to rob two banks at once in Coffeyville, Kansas. But Doolin went on to form a new gang that included notables such as Bitter Creek Newcomb, Black Face Charlie Pierce, a remaining Dalton brother, and the Rose of the Cimarron, Rose Dunn, sister of the notorious Dunn Brothers. Pursuing the gang was a tenacious group of U.S. marshals led by the famed Bill Tilghman. Doolin was considered something of a Robin Hood to the locals—everybody but those he robbed and killed. The marshals were determined to end his reign of terror no matter how long it took. The country, after all, was heading into a new century, and outlaws like Doolin no longer had a place in the West.

Gangs of outlaws were overrunning Oklahoma Territory when E. D. Nix was appointed U.S. marshal in 1893. His memoir evokes a time and place that brought criminals and merchants and cowpunchers and settlers together, often explosively. Oklahombres, originally published in 1929, is an authentic history of human wildness. In these pages the Dalton brothers are shown in full career, as well as the Doolin gang, Bitter Creek Newcomb, Henry Starr, Cattle Annie, Rolla Kapp, Dick Yeager, the Jennings boys, and a large cast of cattle thieves, counterfeiters, and whiskey peddlers. Lawmen are no less memorable than the lawless: Bill Tilghman, Chris Madsen, and Heck Thomas are among the deputies who help Nix in his cleaning-up campaign. Adding to the richness of this account of early days in Oklahoma Territory are such personages as Judge Isaac Parker, Rose of Cimarron, and Chief Bacon Rind of the Osage Indians. Nix himself emerges as a public official of great integrity. Because of his adherence to a code of honor, he could later say that during his administration "not a single man was killed who was not a notorious lawbreaker." Perhaps his proudest moment came when he fired the gun that sent homesteaders rushing into the Cherokee Strip on September 16, 1893. That scene, described with cinematic vividness, is one of many high points in Oklahombres.

Based on the lives of two adolescent girls in the late 19th century who became infatuated with the Western outlaw heroes they had read about in Ned Buntline's stories and left their homes to join them. The outlaws the girls find are the demoralised remnants of the Doolin-Dalton gang, led by the aging Bill Doolin. Annie shames, and inspires the men, to become what she had imagined them to be. The younger sister Jenny finds a father figure in Doolin, who calls her Little Britches. Doolin's efforts to live up to the girls' vision of him lead him to be carted off in a cage to an Oklahoma jail where he waits to be hanged.

In October 1892 the notorious Dalton gang concluded their days of outlawry at Coffeyville, Kansas, with a bold attempt to rob two banks at once in broad daylight. The raiders--Bob, Grat, and Emmett Dalton, Bill Powers, and Dick Broadwell--were nothing more than common hoodlums, says author Robert Barr Smith. The real heroes of the day were the townspeople, who spontaneously turned out in haste and in force to dispatch the outlaws in a bloody downtown shoot-out. Smith sorts out the truth from the legends and suggests answers to some of the perplexing questions about the Coffeyville fight--including whether or not there was a sixth man who got away. In addition, Smith recounts the violent aftermath of the fight: the trial and later life of Emmett Dalton, the only outlaw to survive the raid; and the bloody ends of the Dalton gang’s successors, Bill Doolin and Bill Dalton.