Thomas Edward "Black Jack" Ketchum was executed for an attempt to hold up the C. & S. train between Des Moines and Folsom in the northeastern corner of New Mexico. Ketchum was to be made an example in an effort to prevent further robberies, however his misplaced bravery outshone the more widely known Billy the Kid.

Melzer offers an impressive new book about famous New Mexico gravesites, usually the only monuments left to honor the human treasures who helped shape state, national, and often international history.

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.

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."

Soft-spoken, cheerful, handsome, and well dressed, George West Musgrave “looked more like a senator than a cattle rustler.” Yet he was a cattle rustler as well as a bandit, robber, and killer, “guilty of more crimes than Billy the Kid was ever accused of.” In Last of the Old-Time Outlaws, Karen Holliday Tanner and John D. Tanner, Jr., recount the colorful life of Musgrave (1877-1947), enduring badman of the American Southwest. Musgrave was a charter member of the High Five/Black Jack gang, which was responsible for Arizona’s first bank hold-up, numerous post office and stagecoach robberies, and the largest Santa Fe Railroad heist in history. Following a decade-long hunt, he was captured and acquitted of killing a former Texas Ranger. After this near brush with prison or execution, he headed for South America, where he gained fame as the leading Gringo rustler. It wasn’t until the 1940s that Musgrave’s age and poor health brought an end to a criminal career that had spanned two continents and two centuries. Incorporating previously unknown facts about the career of this frontier outlaw, the Tanners thoroughly document Musgrave’s half-century of crime, from his childhood in the Texas brush country to his final days in Paraguay.

Bestselling author, Colin Murphy, explores the historical figures and events that have existed for centuries in the fringes and brings them out into the open for the reader. Full of historical stories which will intrigue you, captivate you, revolt you and even make you laugh! Colin Murphy welcomes you into the fringes of history where shocking stories and compelling facts await you... Fierce History is a collection of bizarre, grotesque and unexpected episodes from history from all over the world, and from ancient to more modern including: Siblings of famous people - Al Capone's brother who hunted down illegal distillers - Irishman Frank Shackleton, brother of legendary Antarctic explorer Ernest, who was pretty much rubbish at everything, and may have stolen the Irish Crown Jewels - Napoleon's sex-maniac sister Weird historical incidents - Flaming camels of war, - Living turkey parachutes; - Crazy assassination attempts Bizarre medical practices: - Dr Evan O'Neill Kane, who in 1921 performed an appendectomy on himself. - 'Radioactive water' to cure arthritis, gout, neuralgias, poor circulation and a variety of other illnesses – eh, no, it just kills you. Remarkable children: - William Rowan Hamilton by the age of twelve could speak fourteen languages, and went on to discover the quaternion, essential to the development of modern theories of electromagnetism and quantum mechanics, scratching his new mathematical formula on to the side of Broom Bridge in north Dublin

Some of these tales are about genuine heroes. Some are about dastardly villains. Others you’ll have to decide for yourself: hero or villain? You’ll recognize these people, even if you don’t remember their names. They are Spanish colonials, Mexicans, and Anglos all the way to the present. They are even aboriginal Americans predating the arrival of Europeans. These are personal tales—gossip, you might say—and, when you finish a story, if you’re like me, you’ll be able to say, “I didn’t know that!” Now, don’t you think knowing the quirks and grit of those who peopled the pages of your history textbooks—rather than all those dates and places—is more interesting? The author always thought so. After a dozen years writing travel stories about New Mexico, he undertook writing yarns of adventure, intrigue, failure, and even death. Open the book to Elfego Baca’s story and learn why one Mexican had no fear of American cowboys. Or how Navajo Chester Nez, who was denied the right to speak his native language, used Navajo words to help win World War II. Or even how the haughty wife of a colonial governor was falsely denounced to the Inquisition as a Crypto-Jew. Fact or imagination? Sometimes it’s hard to know which it is, but these, at least, are true life episodes. Includes Readers Guide.