Outlaws on Horseback concentrates on the long, unbroken chain of crime that began in the late 1850s with the Missouri-Kansas border warfare and ended in Arkansas in 1921 with the killing of Henry Starr, the last of the authentic desperadoes. Harry Sinclair Drago shows links among the men and women who terrorized the Midwest while he squelches the most outlandish tales about them. The guerrilla warfare led by the evil William Quantrill was training for Frank and Jesse James and Cole and Jim Younger. Drago puts their bloody careers in perspective and tracks down the truth about Belle Starr the Bandit Queen, Cherokee Bill, Rose of the Cimarron, and the gangs, including the Daltons and Doolins, that infested the Oklahoma hills. The action moves from the sacking of Lawrence to the raid on Northfield to the shootout at Coffeyville.

Two men retrace the notorious pair's footsteps, covering thousands of miles of hazardous country on horseback and discovering how little has changed from the saddle in the last 100 years Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the last of the legendary outlaws, were captured on daguerreotype, romanced in fiction, and immortalized on film by Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Simon Casson sets out on horseback to retrace the real-life footsteps of his boyhood heroes, covering 2,000 miles of the country's toughest and most treacherous terrain. Steeped in the lore of the Old West but lacking desert and mountain survival skills, Simon recruits ex-marine commando Richard Adamson. Together they grapple with hostile landscape, climatic extremes, vital supply shortages, and enormous personality clashes. Battling from one outlaw hideout to another and following trails sometimes only accessible by horseback, they are constantly taxed to the limit. In this dramatic account of their adventure, Simon and Richard also encapsulate the exciting and violent lives of the Wild Bunch 100 years ago, and providing an intimate and heartwarming picture of the rancher families who live and work this demanding land today.