Book Reviews
Lee Marvin: Point Blank
- Published June 10, 2013
- Written by Courtney Joyner
Dwayne Epstein’s biography of Lee Marvin, Lee Marvin: Point Blank, is a well-researched labor that he spent years completing.
My Ever Dear Charlie: Letters Home From the Dakota Territory
- Published June 01, 2013
- Written by Cynthia Green
The Charles Draper family homesteaded on the Dakota plains from 1886-87, a year with a notoriously ruinous winter.
The Red Man’s Bones
- Published May 13, 2013
- Written by Jesse Mullins
Rising from inauspicious beginnings to national and even international fame, only to fall victim to his own hubris and naivete, artist George Catlin (1796-1872) charted a career of risk-taking extremes that took him from the Northeast and then to Europe for more than three decades as an ex-pat, before dying in his home country.
This Far-Off Wild Land
- Published May 13, 2013
- Written by Barton H. Barbour
A Scottish emigrant, Andrew Dawson (1817-1871) worked at Pierre Chouteau Jr. and Company’s Upper Missouri trading posts from 1847 until 1864. After superintending Fort Benton from 1854 onward, he retired to Scotland. By then, government freighting contracts and commerce with overland migrants, soldiers and miners had supplanted the old-time Indian trade.
A Lawless Breed
- Published May 13, 2013
- Written by James M Smallwood
With A Lawless Breed: John Wesley Hardin, Texas Reconstruction, and Violence in the Wild West, authors Chuck Parsons and Norman Wayne Brown have added much to the history, legend and lore of the misspent life of a premier Texas murderer. This is the best biography since Leon C. Metz penned his John Wesley Hardin: Dark Angel of Texas. Further, through their meticulous research to determine how much of Hardin’s autobiography is accurate, Parsons and Brown uncovered new sources that were not available to Metz, as well as new illustrations (Metz contributed the foreword for this book). A Lawless Breed will likely become a classic.
I have one quibble with the authors. They adopted a paradigm of a “feud” when covering the tangle between Bill Sutton and the Taylor clan in southern Texas-focus DeWitt County. Yet they did not have a feud. Hardin and the Taylors were known felons, and Sutton was the deputy sheriff charged with bringing in the villains. I have sometimes joked with my friend, Chuck: “You show me a feud, and I’ll show you a lawman chasing outlaws.”
—James M. Smallwood, author of The Feud That Wasn’t: The Taylor Ring, Bill Sutton, John Wesley Hardin, and Violence in Texas
