Richard Maxwell Brown – författare

No Duty to Retreat takes as its starting-point the increased popularity in American society of the old English common-law concept that a person under physical attack has the right to stand his ground, defend himself, and even kill his assailant in self-defence in certain circumstances. This doctrine came to public awareness recently when Berhard Goetz took the law into his own hands when assaulted by four youths in a New York City subway train. There is a chapter on the American as gunfighter, another on a famous vigilante case in California in the 1870s, when farmers retaliated against the Southern Pacific Railroad trying to move them off their lands , and a long chapter discussing `crime, law, and society in America since 1930', in which Brown shows that the crime surge since the 1950s has occurred with the emergence of the Post-Industrial Society, which has left many people alienated and looking for quick solutions.

Helldorado offers cinematic images of wagon trains crossing the Great Plains, of Phoenix and Denver emerging from the dust and mud, of Tombstone blazing through a silver bonanza, and of the railroad joining East and West to change history. In his memoirs, originally published in 1928, William M. Breakenridge is shown doing about everything an enterprising and vigorous young man could do on the frontier. After leaving Wisconsin at the age of sixteen, he became a teamster, railroader; and lawman in Colorado, Arizona, and elsewhere. He took part in the Sand Creek Massacre, here described from his own point of view. Helldorado heats up in its evocation of early-day Tombstone, where, as deputy sheriff, Breakenridge encountered the Earp brothers, Doc Holliday, Bat Masterson, Luke Short, John Ringo, and Buckskin Frank Leslie.