|
About this Book
Punctuated by gunshots
and posse hoofbeats, these true tales, many told
for the first time, illustrate, in both words and rare photographs,
perilous trails and dangerous men from a time gone forever.
• While Tommy Brown and Buck English were born to raise hell, stagecoach
robber Shorty Harris just wanted to buy a
restaurant with his loot.
• Although he didn’t plan on killing lawmen when he helped rob stages to
aid the Confederacy, in the end, ex-Monterey County Undersheriff Tom Poole took the long walk up the Placerville scaffold for murdering Deputy Joseph Staples.
The local newspaper reported, “He smiled on all and seemed perfectly
resigned.”
• Black Bart, the most famous stagecoach robber ever, robbed twenty-eight
stages in eight years. Between robberies, he led the life of a society
gentleman in San
Francisco.
The Sotello brothers, John Keener, Bill Miner,
Louis J. Dreibelbis, Ramon Ruiz, and all the
others were fascinating characters—a desperate breed
who added their stories to the legends of the Old West.
About the Author
Born in Fresno, California, in March of 1930, William B. Secrest grew up in the great San Joaquin Valley. After high school he joined the Marine Corps where he served in a
guard detachment and in a rifle company in the early years of the Korean
War. Returning to college, he obtained a BA in education, but for many
years he served as an art director for a Fresno advertising firm.
Secrest has been interested in history since his youth
and early began comparing Western films to what really happened in the
West. A hobby at first, this avocation quickly developed into
correspondence with noted writers and more serious research. Not satisfied
in a collaboration with friend and Western writer Ray Thorp, Secrest began researching and writing his own articles
in the early 1960s.
Although at first he
wrote on many general Western subjects, some years ago Secrest
realized how his home state has consistently been neglected in the Western
genre and concentrated almost exclusively on early California subjects. He has produced hundreds of articles
for such publications as Westways, Montana, True West, and the American West, while publishing seven
monographs on early California themes. His book I Buried Hickok
(Early West Publishing Co.) appeared in 1980, followed by Lawmen &
Desperadoes (The Arthur H. Clark Co.) in 1994 and Dangerous Trails (Barbed Wire Press) in 1995.
Books published with Word Dancer Press include California Desperadoes
(1999), Perilous Trails, Dangerous Men (2001), and When the Great
Spirit Died (2002). Current projects include a biography of Harry
Love, the leader of the rangers who tracked down Joaquin Murrieta, and
famous feuding families of California.
|
|
