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Fourteen years in the making, this is a chronicle of the nearly two-thousand-mile international line between the United States and Mexico. It is an historical account largely through the eyes and experiences of government agents, politicians, soldiers, revolutionaries, outlaws, Indians, engineers, immigrants, developers, illegal aliens, business people, and wayfarers looking for a job. It is essentially the untold story of lines drawn in water, sand, and blood, of an intrepid, durable people, of a civilization whose ebb and flow of history is as significant as any in the world. Award-winning historian Leon Metz takes the reader from America's early westward expansion to today's awesome border problems of water rights, pollution, immigration, illegal aliens, and the massive effort of two nations attempting to pull together for a common cause.
Standoffs, saloons, and sunsets spring to mind when one envisions the rough and tumble early days of the American frontier.
Thus spoke one lawman about John Wesley Hardin, easily the most feared and fearless of all the gunfighters in the West. Nobody knows the exact number of his victims-perhaps as few as twenty or as many as fifty. In his way of thinking, Hardin never shot a man who did not deserve it. Seeking to gain insight into Hardin’s homicidal mind, Leon Metz describes how Hardin’s bloody career began in post-Civil War Central Texas, when lawlessness and killings were commonplace, and traces his life of violence until his capture and imprisonment in 1878. After numerous unsuccessful escape attempts, Hardin settled down and received a pardon years later in 1895. He wrote an autobiography but did not live to see it published. Within a few months of his release, John Selman gunned him down in an El Paso saloon.
Before Dallas Stoudenmire accepted the position as marshal of El Paso, there existed no authority except that of the six-shooter, and very little precedent for a peace officer to follow. No one before had held the job for more than a couple of months. Yet, within two years, with the help of Jim Gillett, his young deputy, Stoudenmire had cleaned up the town, a task that earned him many enemies and, in the end, death. This is the story of Dallas Stoudenmire-auburn-haired, fiery-eyed, six-foot, two-inch gunfighter, container of laughter, liquor, and death-during the two tumultuous years in the early 1880’s when he served as almost the only law north of the Rio Grande and west of Fort Worth.
Biography of the man who killed Billy the Kid, this thorough and well-written analysis deals effectively with almost every question that has been raised about the controversial life and death of Pat Garrett.
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Leon Metz has pieced together, for the first time, all that is known of John Selman, a shadowy figure in Texas and New Mexico during the unsettled, often violent, period after the Civil War. Unlike many of his comrades--including the most notorious outlaws of his time--John Selman did not wish to become well known. Indeed, his penchant for assumed names indicates he did not wish to be known at all. Selman was an enigmatic man of many parts: he was an oldest son, responsive to the needs of his mother and siblings; a soldier with a talent for leadership--until his unexplained desertion from the Confederate Army; a husband and father; a rancher who struggled with, and murdered, would-be grangers; and a devoted friend to an evil influence named John Larn, with whom he seemed to kill for sport. As the Southwest became more settled, so did John Selman. At the end of his career, when he was a constable in El Paso, Selman lost his anonymity for all time: He was the man who killed John Wesley Hardin. Metz explores the stories surrounding Hardin's death--some said Selman shot Hardin in the back. Including rare photographs, Metz presents his conclusions about this legendary gunfighter.
Two French Protestant refugees in eighteenth-century Amsterdam gave the world an extraordinary work that intrigued and outraged readers across Europe. In this captivating account, Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt take us to the vibrant Dutch Republic and its flourishing book trade to explore the work that sowed the radical idea that religions could be considered on equal terms. Famed engraver Bernard Picart and author and publisher Jean Frederic Bernard produced The Religious Ceremonies and Customs of All the Peoples of the World, which appeared in the first of seven folio volumes in 1723. They put religion in comparative perspective, offering images and analysis of Jews, Cat...
Legend has it that twenty miles of volcanic rock rising through the landscape of northern Bohemia was the work of the devil, who separated the warring Czechs and Germans by building a wall. The nineteenth-century invention of the Devil's Wall was evidence of rising ethnic tensions. In interwar Czechoslovakia, Sudeten German nationalists conceived a radical mission to try to restore German influence across the region. Mark Cornwall tells the story of Heinz Rutha, an internationally recognized figure in his day, who was the pioneer of a youth movement that emphasized male bonding in its quest to reassert German dominance over Czech space. Through a narrative that unravels the threads of Rutha'...