Haunted West - The Legendary Tales From The Frontier About Ruthless Outlaws, Bold Women, Native American Hereos, Legendary Figures & Even A Quick Story About Wild Bill Longley's Botched Hanging
Regular price $13.99Welcome to the Wild West
The images are ingrained into the American psyche: cowboys and Indians, gunslingers and stagecoach robbers, lassos and saddles, six guns and nooses. It’s a time when freedom seemed as vast as the prairie—and violence and death loomed behind every ridge.
Legends were born that endure and resonate to this day. Whether it was settlers in wagon trains, prospectors on mules, Native Americans on ponies, stagecoaches over rutted trails, or trains rumbling over newly laid tracks, the West was always in motion. Any pause was temporary, and volatile. Towns like Dodge City, Tombstone, Deadwood, Virginia City and Bodie teemed with restless energy, of dreams found and shattered, with nerves edgy from exhaustion after toiling in the mines or riding herd, from whiskey, from loneliness.
Life could be cold, brutal and short, and yet—for those who lived in big cities hundreds of miles away—there hung a romance to it all. Dime novels churned out adventure yarns that made heroes, or antiheroes, out of crooks like Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, lawmen like the Earp Brothers, the hybrid dentist-gunfighter Doc Holliday, the female outlaw Belle Starr and lady gambler Lottie Deno. The Wild West shows brought these stories to life, with buffalo slayer Buffalo Bill and warrior Sitting Bull playing themselves before mesmerized crowds around the world. The movies splashed it on the big screens.
While the stories now are the stuff of myth, the tangible links remain. As the wind howls through ruins of boomtowns that went bust, you can still hear them, their rattle of spurs, the clink of their whiskey glasses, the crack of a Colt. They call them ghost towns for a reason. The shadows flash across the splintered wood, an image appears in an upstairs window. Is it a real or the imagination? In the Old West, it’s really the same thing.