Bill O'Neal – författare

In the early 1900s, two families in Scurry and Kent counties in West Texas united in a marriage of fourteen-year-old Gladys Johnson to twenty-one-year-old Ed Sims. Billy Johnson, the father, set up Gladys and Ed on a ranch, and the young couple had two daughters. But Gladys was headstrong and willful, and Ed drank too much, and both sought affection outside their marriage. A nasty divorce ensued, and Gladys moved with her girls to her father’s luxurious ranch house, where she soon fell in love with famed Texas Ranger Frank Hamer. When Ed tried to take his daughters for a prearranged Christmas visit in 1916, Gladys and her brother Sid shot him dead on the Snyder square teeming with shoppers.One of the best lawyers in West Texas, Judge Cullen Higgins (son of the old feudist Pink Higgins) managed to win acquittal for both Gladys and Sid. In the tradition of Texas feudists since the 1840s, the Sims family sought revenge. Sims’ son-in-law, Gee McMeans, led an attack in Sweetwater and shot Billy Johnson’s bodyguard, Frank Hamer, twice, while Gladys—by now Mrs. Hamer—fired at another assassin. Hamer shot back, killed McMeans, and was no-billed on the spot by a grand jury watching the shootout through a window. An attempt against Billy Johnson failed, but a three-man team shotgunned the widely respected Cullen Higgins. Texas Rangers and other lawmen caught one of the assassins, extracted a confession, and then prompted his “suicide” in a Sweetwater jail cell.

Much information (some of it factual, a lot of it fictional) is available about the famous gunfighters of the Old West - the Jameses, Billy the Kid, Wild Bill Hickok, Wyatt Earp, John Wesley Hardin, and that latter-day folk idol, Butch Cassidy. Dozens of less-well-known but sometimes even more murderous gunslingers - such men as Cullen Baker, Harvey Logan, Longhaired Jim Courtright, and Mysterious Dave Mather - have received only scant mention in scattered accounts.This encyclopedia - a who's who of the gunfighting West-provides a compilation of facts, sifted myths, folklore, and outright lies, about the lives and deaths of 255 men, both the famous and the all but forgotten. Also included are detailed accounts of the almost six hundred gunfights the men took part in, mostly between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the century.Each entry follows a concise and useful format: an alphabetical listing of the gunman; nicknames or aliases; dates and places of birth and death, is known; the occupations the man pursued; a brief biography; and, in chronological order, accounts of the verified gunfights in which he participated.In the Introduction, from the information he amassed in this volume, Bill O'Neal provides a fascinating summary of the data and offers new insights into the nature of the western gunmen and of the feuds and fights that bloodied the West. For example, he relates how a large number of the gunfighters used guns as tools of their trades, legitimate and otherwise - lawmen and detectives, buffalo hunters, army scouts, thieves, hired killers, and the like. Of the gunfighters included here 108 served as law officers at some time in their careers. The average lifespan, including those who died of natural causes, was forty-seven years, and more than 50 percent of the gunmen died from gunshot wounds.Encyclopedia of Western Gunfighters offers a unique compilation of information about these men - a comprehensive and reliable source.

John Chisum was a legendary figure of the Old West cattle frontier. At thirteen he migrated with his family from Tennessee to the Republic of Texas. During the 1850s Chisum recognized opportunity in the fledgling range cattle industry, and within a few years his herds numbered in the tens of thousands. Chisum soon owned more cattle than any other individual in America, and his Jinglebob herds were the only cattle in the West known by an earmark rather than by a famous brand.Chisum was a true pioneer, seeking open range grass farther and farther and still farther to the west. During three decades on a succession of frontier ranches, Chisum endured Indian raids, stock thievery, drought, financial reverses, and the murderous Lincoln County War. Chisum had courage, a taste for adventure, a shrewd head for business, and he confidently operated his risky frontier profession on an enormous scale.His last ranch was the biggest, stretching for 200 miles along the Pecos River and grazing as many as 80,000 head of Jinglebob cattle. He built a headquarters complex worthy of a cattle king, relishing the role of host to one and all. After thirty spectacular years as a western rancher, Chisum died at sixty, just as his beloved open range was being enclosed by barbed wire. But he was known throughout cow country as the "e;Jinglebob King,"e; the "e;Cattle King of the Pecos,"e; and the "e;Cattle King of the West."e;