Writing Program: Outlawed and Infamous

Standoffs, saloons and sunsets spring to mind when one envisions the rough and tumble early days of the American frontier. Indeed, the golden period of the American West produced some of the most notorious badmen and bravest lawmen in American history, many of whom have become legends. Some rogues are familiar: John Wesley Hardin (who, it is said, killed more than 40 men), William Bonney (Billy the Kid), Wild Bill Hickok, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Others are not so well known but were no less dangerous: John Slaughter, Buckskin Frank Leslie, Wild Bill Longely, Liver-Eating Johnson, and Bill Doolin. Then there are the peacekeepers, the brave men who helped tame the Wild West: The Earp Brothers, Pat Garrett, and Texas Rangers such as James Gillett and Dallas Stoudenmire.

This collection of short, action-filled stories of the Old West's most egregiously badly behaved female outlaws is a great addition to Western author Robert Barr Smith's books on the American frontier. Pulling together stories of ladies caught in the acts of mayhem, distraction, murder, and highway robbery, it includes famous names like Belle Starr and lesser known characters as well. The book also contains archival illustrations and photographs.

In this study of women prisoners in men's penitentiaries from 1865 to 1915, Anne M. Butler shows that the women, already faced with distinct gender disadvantages within western society, were subjected to intense physical and mental violence while in prison. For women of color or of lower social class, she argues, the violence was even greater and more frequent. Butler's poignant cross-cultural account draws on prison records and the words of the women themselves. She explores how nineteenth-century criminologists constructed the criminal woman; the elements of age, race, class, and gender in women's court proceedings; the kinds of violence encountered by women inmates; their diet, illnesses, experiences with pregnancy and child-bearing; prison work systems for women; and women's own strategies for response.

In this companion volume to Getting Away with Murder on the Texas Frontier, veteran defense attorney and prosecutor Bill Neal takes readers from Mississippi to the frontiers of West Texas, Indian Territory, New Mexico Territory, and finally the frozen Montana wilderness through a series of linked, true-life tales of crimes and trials. Tracing the struggles of incipient criminal justice in the Southwest through an engaging progression of outlaws and lawmen, plus a host of colorful frontier trial lawyers and judges, Neal reveals how law and society matured together.