David Grassé – författare

In December 1883, five outlaws attempted to rob the A.A. Castaneda Mercantile establishment in the fledgling mining town of Bisbee in the Arizona Territory. The robbery was a disaster: four citizens shot dead, one a pregnant woman. The failed heist was national news, with the subsequent manhunt, trial and execution of the alleged perpetrators followed by newspapers from New York to San Francisco.The Bisbee Massacre was as momentous as the infamous blood feud between the Earp brothers and the cowboys two years earlier, and led to the only recorded lynching in the town of Tombstone--John Heath, a sporting man, who was thought to be the mastermind. New research indicates he may have been innocent. This comprehensive history takes a fresh look at the event that marked the end of the Wild West period in the Arizona Territory.

In her early 20s, Edna Loftus had the world at her feet. As a showgirl in England and France during the Edwardian Era, she appeared in a number of successful theater productions, regularly graced the pages of contemporary magazines, and was featured on numerous picture postcards. She hobnobbed with royalty and kept company with the creme de la creme of European society. Then fate seemingly turned on Edna. After two unsuccessful marriages (the second ending with her husband being incarcerated in an asylum), she was left alone in California, and her decline into poverty and prostitution became fodder for the newspapers which had once sung her praises. By the time of her death in her early 30s, Edna was "a pathetic figure pointed out as a bit of a curiosity because she once had been famous on two continents."Edna Loftus was very much a product of her times. It was not simply a matter of bad choices on Edna's part which led to her dissolution, but also the institutionalized socio-cultural constructs of patriarchy, classism, and religious intolerance of the Edwardian Era. This biography, the first ever written about Edna, examines how these factors played into her descent from the sparkling footlights of the European theaters to the red lights of San Francisco's infamous Tenderloin District, and, in the end, destroyed her.