Books like Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid as I knew them by John P. Meadows

A sweeping late‑nineteenth‑century cattle drive from Texas to Montana follows former Texas Rangers Augustus McCrae and William F. Call as they confront the American West's myths, love, and violence in this epic of adventure and friendship.

A Pulitzer‑winning historical novel that dramatizes the four‑day Battle of Gettysburg from the viewpoints of Union and Confederate leaders.

Fourteen‑year‑old Mattie Ross sets out from Fort Smith, Arkansas, to hunt down Tom Chaney—whom she blames for her father’s death—guided by the grizzled U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn.

A young woman defends her faith and freedom in a polygamous Mormon community while hunting her captors in the rugged American West.

Barnabas Sackett discovers six gold Roman coins and plans a trading venture to America, but an aristocratic enemy, Rupert Genester, threatens his life. After a daring escape from a pirate ship, Sackett heads to the Carolina coast, confronting family secrets and a promise to his father.

Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man is a historical Western that examines American frontier and pioneer life, highlighting the cultural and political tensions between white settlers and Cheyenne Indians.

A gripping examination of justice and mob mentality set in Nevada’s Old West, The Ox‑Bow Incident follows a small frontier town’s descent into vigilantism after a sheriff’s warning is ignored.

A history of the life, adventures, and death of William H. Bonney, better known as Billy, the Kid, written by Sheriff Pat Garrett, the man responsible for killing the outlaw in 1881.

History has treated Billy the Kid like a homicidal psychopath, a brazen madman responsible for as many as 21 murders. Steeped in legend, shrouded in folklore and outright lies, Billy the Kid has been portrayed for over 125 years as one of the most savage killers in American folklore. Yet for others, particularly the Hispanic people of the Southwest, the Kid was an avenging angel and a sagebrush Robin Hood. For them and many others, the Kid embodied youth, nobility, humanity, romance, and tragedy. He was the symbolic transition between the old and the new, with a blazing sixgun in hand. Now along comes Michael Wallis's sympathetic yet completely authoritative biography, which challenges and debunks many of the myths that have hounded this young man since his death at the age of 21 in New Mexico Territory. By scrupulously retelling Billy the Kid's brief but compelling story in an effort to set the record straight,Wallis -- renowned for his social histories of the West -- has created a new portrait of this outlaw. Countless books have been published about the Lincoln County War, including Billy the Kid's role in that conflict and the aftermath, but few authors have analyzed the Kid's crimes in the larger context of the political and social corruption that had become a way of life in New Mexico Territory. Wallis describes how the outlaw legend was deliberately manufactured and manipulated -- in fact, really the kid only became known by that name in the last year of his life. Furthermore, we learn how the few killings in which the Kid was actually implicated were used to divert attention from much larger societal corruption and crimes committed by a brotherhood of cunning politicians and power brokers. Wallis's Billy the Kid is more than a riveting story; the book is an extraordinary evocation of the reality of the Old West. With fascinating details of 19th century life, Wallis presents the brief, unhappy ballad of a rootless young man, most likely born to an immigrant Irish woman in New York just before the Civil War. Wallis then uses the story of Billy the Kid to explain the history of the violent settlement of the West and the development of frontier life between 1865 and 1881. We learn of the rise of the gun culture, the dangerous criminal world of New Mexico's Lincoln County, and everyday life at remote frontier outposts. We also meet many of the legendary heroes and antiheroes who, like the Kid, have been mythologized over time. - Jacket flap.