They Die But Once

Here is an utterly new departure in biography of the Old West. Writing in the hangered, hard-boiled style made famous by Hemingway and O’Hara, James B. O’Neil has succeeded in transferring the color and idiom of the wild and roaring days of the West to the printed page. They Die But Once is authentic biography—the life story of Jeff Ake, last of the Western gunfighters and vaqueros—yet because of the facility with which the author has translated the spirit of the period into language attuned to the twentieth century, the story moves with all the breathtaking speed of a current gangster thriller. O’Neil discards all the saccharine sentimentality that has clouded the real West of the seventies and presents Jeff Ake’s story in the sharp, biting understatement of contemporary prose.

With the reek of a Texan prison camp in his nostrils, Jeff Ake rode, rampant unreconstruction in his heart, away from the looted Federal Treasury in Austin, with three hundred of Price’s army, into Mexico, where he joined Porfirio Diaz’s bodyguard. Back he came, with horse-trappings of human Comanche-hide and six-guns blazing, to enter the bloody range wars. Hell-bent-for-leather, he rode up and down the range, while pistols barked their staccato tale of sudden death.

In They Die But Once, you will find the reason why Pat Garrett died; the sad tale of the bullet of Billy the Kid; the true cause of John Wesley Hardin’s capture. Bill Longley, Jim Gillett, John Ringo, Kit Carson, Jesse and Frank James, General Custer, Gene Rhodes and Roy Bean (“The Law West of the Pecos”) live and fight and love and die in the thrill-studded pages of They Die But Once. You who have read and not quite believed Clarence Mulford and William Patterson White, hear and know: What they told is only what they dared tell, Jeff Ake tells even more—and can prove a lot of it!