Authoritative guide to everything in print about lawmen and the lawless—from Billy the Kid to the painted ladies of frontier cow towns. Nearly 2,500 entries, taken from newspapers, court records, and more.

American violence is schizophrenic. On the one hand, many Americans support the creation of a powerful bureaucracy of coercion made up of police and military forces in order to provide public security. At the same time, many of those citizens also demand the private right to protect their own families, home, and property. This book diagnoses this schizophrenia as a product of a distinctive institutional history, in which private forms of violence - vigilantes, private detectives, mercenary gunfighters - emerged in concert with the creation of new public and state forms of violence such as police departments or the National Guard. This dual public and private face of American violence resulted from the upending of a tradition of republican governance, in which public security had been indistinguishable from private effort, by the nineteenth-century social transformations of the Civil War and the Market Revolution.

The true story of the world’s first robbery of a moving train, and the real origins of the Wild West They were the first outlaws to rob a moving train. But from 1864 to 1868, the Reno brothers and their gang of counterfeiters, robbers, burglars, and safecrackers also held the town of Seymour, Indiana, hostage, making a large hotel near the train station their headquarters. When the gang robbed the Adams Express car of the Ohio & Mississippi Railroad on the outskirts of Seymour on October 6, 1866, it shocked the world—and made other burgeoning outlaws like Jesse James sit up and take notice. The extraordinary—and extra-legal—efforts to take them out defined the term “frontier justice.” From the first report of the robbery, Allan Pinkerton’s operatives were on the scene, followed by kidnappings, lynchings, and an extradition from Canada to Indiana that caused an international incident. In the end, ten members of the Reno Gang were hanged, including three of the Reno brothers. And no one was ever charged with the murders. The Notorious Reno Gang tells the complete story for the first time, revealing how these gangsters, Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, and the little city of Seymour ushered in the Wild West.

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