Eddie Foy, the famous vaudevillian who toured the West during the late 1800s, was qouted as saying that compared to Leadville, Colorado, Dodge City resembled a Sunday School. The 10,200 - foot high "Magic City" was one of the wildest mining camps of the era. This book is a semi-biographical history of Martin "Mart" Duggan, who was Leadville City marshal for two and nearly three terms before he met his end at the hands of gambling pals. But Leadville was also home to numerous other fascinating characters, not the least of whom was John Henry "Doc" Holliday, who had his last gunfight in Leadville in 1884. They all came to Leadville: the confidence men, the gamblers, the stage robbers, and the "soiled doves" though they could have never known it at the time, being primarily concerned with survival, these individuals in their totality combined to create one of the most intriguing camps in the Wild West. And the site of much of the action that made Leadville unique occurred on State Street, the half mile long stretch of gambling dens, saloons, and bawdy houses that rivaled any red light district then in existence. Even today, when State Street has been renamed Second Street, one can imagine Mart Duggan, Doc Holliday, and Tombstone's Johnny Tyler, to name only a few walking westward from Harrison Avenue to the east-west mecca of State Street. Gazing upward they would see majestic Mount Massive directly in front of them. What a view! What a mining camp! Marshal Mart Duggan's Leadville - the Wild West at its most fascinating.

When New York City shopkeeper Steve Dancy moved west to experience the frontier, he wound up embroiled in a deadly feud ... a feud he was forced to settle with guns. Now all he wants to do is follow up on a few business interests, write about his adventures, and continue his exploration of the West. But in the autumn of 1879, Joseph McAllen asks Dancy for help. Ute renegades have abducted a young girl near Mesa Verde, Colorado, and the Pinkerton captain wants him to join the rescue party. Surprisingly, the trail doesn't lead into the San Juan Mountains, but to Leadville -- a rich mining town teeming with the worst elements of a raw frontier. Bitter feuds, vendettas, and greed turn the affair into a bloody conflict that spans the state. Dancy has proven that he can handle himself in dangerous situations. But will this shopkeeper survive the perils of an untamed mountain wilderness?

Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid, Doc Holliday—such are the legendary names that spring to mind when we think of the western gunfighter. But in the American West of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, thousands of grassroots gunfighters straddled both sides of the law without hesitation. Deadly Dozen tells the story of twelve infamous gunfighters, feared in their own times but almost forgotten today. Now, noted historian Robert K. DeArment has compiled the stories of these obscure men. DeArment, a life-long student of law and lawlessness in the West, has combed court records, frontier newspapers, and other references to craft twelve complete biographical portraits. The combined stories of Deadly Dozen offer an intensive look into the lives of imposing figures who in their own ways shaped the legendary Old West. More than a collective biography of dangerous gunfighters, Deadly Dozen also functions as a social history of the gunfighter culture of the post-Civil War frontier West. As Walter Noble Burns did for Billy the Kid in 1926 and Stuart N. Lake for Wyatt Earp in 1931, DeArment—himself a talented writer—brings these figures from the Old West to life. John Bull, Pat Desmond, Mart Duggan, Milt Yarberry, Dan Tucker, George Goodell, Bill Standifer, Charley Perry, Barney Riggs, Dan Bogan, Dave Kemp, and Jeff Kidder are the twelve dangerous men that Robert K. DeArment studies in Deadly Dozen: Twelve Forgotten Gunfighters of the Old West.

This book is about the real Old West. The research presented here comes from what I've found during my more than forty-five years of researching American history, but especially what I've learned in regards to the other side of the myths and legends of the Old West. In 2010, I started a blog, The American Cowboy Chronicles, to share what I've learned and celebrate the virtues of America. My articles on the Old West have never been meant to dispel the myths or attack legends but to simply explain what I've found after taking a hard look, an honest look, an objective look, at the evidence that's available. Since evidence proves or disproves what we've all been told about the Old West by Hollywood and writers who are not objective researchers, this is my attempt at taking a fresh look at Wyatt Earp, Tom Horn, and others. But mostly, this book is about why the American Cowboy became America's quintessential role model. This book looks at why the American Cowboy represents American toughness, independence, and resilience to the rest of the World.

Longarm enlists a play-pretty in a game of play-deadly! Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long is out to recover fifty grand that the late Abner Prentiss hid away before being arrested—in the company of hired gal-pal Cherry Poppin. Since Prentiss murdered his partners, his former play-pretty may be the only one who can lead Longarm to the stash. But traipsing around town with everyone’s favorite whore is no way to conduct an investigation—and Longarm is soon defending Miss Poppin’s honor like a latter-day Don Quixote. And now that a suddenly cash-rich local lawman may be involved, it looks like a lot more blood will be shed over this dead outlaw’s blood money…

In her pulchritudinous prime Baby Doe was called the Silver Queen of Colorado by journalists and "that shameless hussy" by the proper wives of the men who eyed her. Flirtatious, adventurous, ambitious, Elizabeth McCourt Doe gave everyone a lot to talk about when she met Horace Tabor, the Silver King of Leadville, in 1880. Three years later they were free to legalize their passion. Although thirty years separated them, they were well matched in romantic recklessness. If The Legend of Baby Doe is the lowdown on the high jinks of two public lives, it is also the story of a love that survived spectacularly good times and bad. Before bad times came, Baby and Horace went on a spending spree. They built an opulent opera house in Denver and bought an Italian-ate villa. Baby Doe went out bejeweled and ermined, and sat at home alone, snubbed by the social dragons. John Burke has written about the giddy rise of a bonanza king who dreamed of entering the White House with Baby Doe on his arm and about the disastrous fall they took together. Wiped out by unwise investments and the Panic of 1893, Tabor soon died, leaving Baby Doe and their two daughters penniless. Reportedly, his deathbed order was to "hang on to the Matchless," a played-out mine filled with water. She managed to do that for almost four decades, struggling heroically against loneliness, poverty, and heartbreak, and becoming one of the great legends of the American West.