Dodge City
Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and the Wickedest Town in the American West
-
- 11,99 €
-
- 11,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
The instant New York Times bestseller!
Dodge City, Kansas, is a place of legend. The town that started as a small military site exploded with the coming of the railroad, cattle drives, eager miners, settlers, and various entrepreneurs passing through to populate the expanding West. Before long, Dodge City’s streets were lined with saloons and brothels and its populace was thick with gunmen, horse thieves, and desperadoes of every sort. By the 1870s, Dodge City was known as the most violent and turbulent town in the West.
Enter Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson. Young and largely self-trained men, the lawmen led the effort that established frontier justice and the rule of law in the American West, and did it in the wickedest place in the United States. When they moved on, Wyatt to Tombstone and Bat to Colorado, a tamed Dodge was left in the hands of Jim Masterson. But before long Wyatt and Bat, each having had a lawman brother killed, returned to that threatened western Kansas town to team up to restore order again in what became known as the Dodge City War before riding off into the sunset.
#1 New York Times bestselling author Tom Clavin's Dodge City tells the true story of their friendship, romances, gunfights, and adventures, along with the remarkable cast of characters they encountered along the way (including Wild Bill Hickock, Jesse James, Doc Holliday, Buffalo Bill Cody, John Wesley Hardin, Billy the Kid, and Theodore Roosevelt) that has gone largely untold—lost in the haze of Hollywood films and western fiction, until now.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Recounting the most famous of cattle towns and its two most influential lawmen, Clavin (Reckless) argues that it wasn't gunfights but rather the refusal to fight that eventually tamed Dodge City, Kans., the "wickedest town in the American west." Though the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Ariz., has passed into popular legend, fewer know of the Dodge City War, the last hurrah of the town's violent legacy, which the legendary Wyatt Earp and lesser-known Bat Masterson resolved without violence. The romanticization and mythification of the West and the gunslinger is Clavin's greatest challenge; with a firm dedication to the truth, he has attempted to confirm what he can and qualify what he cannot. Though this fact-checking may take some of the glamor out of the popular conception of Earp in particular, Clavin's book brims with a colorful collection of real outlaws, sex workers, gamblers, and chorus dancers whose personalities, deeds, and even nicknames help readers understand why the Western legend entranced the nation in the first place. To know the history of Dodge City is to understand how the West was won, and this history is often just as captivating and strange as the legends that have supplanted it.