Thomas E. Ketchum, better known as "Black Jack" Ketchum, and his small gang were on the run in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona for less than four years, and their career of banditry lasted for little more than two years. At his hanging in 1901 he declared, "Hurry up boys, I'm due in Hell for dinner."

Many well-read students, historians, and loyal aficionados of Texas Ranger lore know the name of Texas Ranger Captain Frank Jones (1856-1893), who died on the Texas-Mexico border in a shootout with Mexican rustlers. In Six-Shooters and Shifting Sands, Bob Alexander has now penned the first full-length biography of this important nineteenth-century Texas Ranger. At an early age Frank Jones, a native Texan, would become a Frontier Battalion era Ranger. His enlistment with the Rangers coincided with their transition from Indian fighters to lawmen. While serving in the Frontier Battalion officers' corps of Company D, Frank Jones supervised three of the four "great" captains of that era: J.A. Brooks, John H. Rogers, and John R. Hughes. Besides Austin Ira Aten and his younger brothers Calvin Grant Aten and Edwin Dunlap Aten, Captain Jones also managed law enforcement activities of numerous other noteworthy Rangers, such as Philip Cuney "P.C." Baird, Benjamin Dennis Lindsey, Bazzell Lamar "Baz" Outlaw, J. Walter Durbin, Jim King, Frank Schmid, and Charley Fusselman, to name just a few. Frank Jones' law enforcing life was anything but boring. Not only would he find himself dodging bullets and returning fire, but those Rangers under his supervision would also experience gunplay. Of all the Texas Ranger companies, Company D contributed the highest number of on-duty deaths within Texas Ranger ranks.

In the late nineteenth century Tom Ketchum and his brother Sam formed the Ketchum Gang with other outlaws and became successful train robbers. In their day, these men were the most daring of their kind, and the most feared. Eventually Tom Ketchum was caught and sentenced to death for attempting to hold up a railway train. He became the first individual--and the last--ever to be executed for a crime of this sort. Jeffrey Burton has been researching the story of the Ketchum Gang for more than forty years. He sorts fact from fiction to provide the definitive truth about Ketchum and numerous other outlaws, including Will Carver and Butch Cassidy. The Deadliest Outlaws initially was published in a limited run of one hundred paperback copies in England. This second edition in hardcover contains additional material and photographs not found in the earlier printing.

Slocum is always bad news for outlaws… Despite its name, there’s always trouble brewing in the small mining town of Nirvana, Nevada. John Slocum’s just riding through, when the comely widow Mrs. Benteen—and newspaper reporter—asks for his help on a scoop about claim-jumpers. If no news is good news, then for Slocum this is downright bad… Slocum reckons he’d rather mosey along, but he’s never left a widow—especially a right pretty one—high and dry. But when claim-jumpers find him snooping around Nirvana, Slocum had better defend himself before he makes the papers—the obituaries, that is…

Vol. 49, no. 9 (Sept. 1922) accompanied by a separately paged section entitled ERA: electronic reactions of Abrams.