'Drago...imparts freshness to his narrative by incorporating within it a running commentary on what other writers have said about a particular crime or criminal. In the process he corrects errors' - "New York Times Book Review". 'Drago is a revisionist, and his skeptical, informed mind demolishes several heroic legends' - "Library Journal". "Outlaws on Horseback" concentrates on the long, unbroken chain of crime that began in the late 1850s with the Missouri-Kansas border warfare and ended in Arkansas in 1921 with the killing of Henry Starr, the last of the authentic desperadoes. Harry Sinclair Drago shows links among the men and women who terrorized the Midwest while he squelches the most outlandish tales about them.The guerrilla warfare led by the evil William Quantrill was training for Frank and Jesse James and Cole and Jim Younger. Drago puts their bloody careers in perspective and tracks down the truth about Belle Starr the Bandit Queen, Cherokee Bill, Rose of the Cimarron, and the gangs, including the Daltons and Doolins, that infested the Oklahoma hills. The action moves from the sacking of Lawrence to the raid on Northfield to the shootout at Coffeyville.
Harry Sinclair Drago built a reputation as a reliable popular historian of the American West. Introducer Richard Patterson is the author of "Train Robbery: The Birth, Flowering, and Decline of a Notorious Western Enterprise" and "Historical Atlas of the Outlaw West".
- ISBN10 0585266433
- ISBN13 9780585266435
- Publish Date December 1998 (first published 1 March 1998)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint University of Nebraska Press
- Format eBook
- Language English