Give a Boy a Gun

On January 5, 1981, Idaho game wardens Bill Pogue and Conley Elms rode into the remote Owyhee Desert to check a report of poaching at Claude Dallas's trapping camp. They never rode out.

Dallas shot both men. When one fell wounded, he retrieved a .22 rifle and finished the job with a bullet to the head. Then he turned to the witness who had seen everything and said: "This is Murder One for me." He buried the bodies and disappeared into the wilderness.

Claude Dallas styled himself a modern-day mountain man, clanking through the high desert in hand-filed spurs and well-oiled guns, living by the Old West code, answering to no government, settling disputes with a gun. For fifteen months he eluded one of the largest manhunts in Western history, sheltered by a network of friends and sympathizers who saw in his colorful ways the embodiment of the cowboy mystique. When he was finally captured, he became something more unsettling than a fugitive: a folk hero. Songs were written about him. Books celebrated him. Strangers raised money for his defense.

At his trial, women known as the "Dallas Cheerleaders" gathered daily in the courtroom. His lawyers put the victim on trial, portraying Bill Pogue as a bully who had provoked Dallas into defending himself. After seven days of deliberation, the jury found Claude Dallas guilty of voluntary manslaughter, not murder. He served less than half his sentence before escaping from prison. For nearly a year he topped the FBI Ten Most Wanted list, hunted across the American West by federal agents and U.S. Marshals. He was eventually released a free man.

Jack Olsen, the New York Times bestselling author known as "the dean of true crime," spent years reconstructing every dimension of this story: the killings, the manhunt, the bizarre trial, and the cultural fault line the case exposed. Law and order against frontier freedom. Justice against vigilante romanticism. Government authority against the myth of the self-sufficient Western man.

"There's something wrong," Olsen wrote, "about creating a myth out of a murder."

Give a Boy a Gun is his answer to that myth, and a searing tribute to the two men whose names the myth forgot.