Death of a Gunfighter: The Quest for Jack Slade, the West’s Most Elusive Legend, by Dan Rottenberg, $29.95. While Jack Slade was one of the West’s legendary gunmen, neither academics nor Western history buffs know much about him. Slade is likely to remain an enigma, although author Dan Rottenberg has done his darnedest to track down facts about the man and compile them into “Death of a Gunfighter.”
The dearth of information is attributable in part to Mark Twain, a great storyteller but no respecter of truth. He embellished Slade’s legend in “Roughing It,” a yarn that many who should have known better took as fact. And Slade himself encouraged the stories of his ruthlessness as a protection against the lawless who might have taken him on.
Known as “the law west of Kearney,” Slade ran a stretch of the Overland Express and its predecessor lines, as well as the Pony Express, in the 1860s. Armed with a reputation and a fast gun, he brooked no interference with operations and was quick to gun down those who stole from the company. One such victim was Jules Beni (founder of Julesburg). After killing Beni, Slade cut off the man’s ears and carried them around in his pocket.
Slade eventually ended up in Virginia City, Mont., where his drinking got him into trouble. A reasonable man when sober, Slade turned into a psychopath when drunk. He eventually ran afoul of the vigilantes there.
No photograph remains of Slade, and he kept no diary or other writings, so separating fact from legend isn’t easy. Rottenberg does an excellent job of research with what’s available and fleshes out the story with the histories of overland transportation, as well as of Virginia City. He tells as good a story of Slade as the facts will let him, and it’s almost as intriguing as the Twain tall tale.
Placing Memory: A Photographic Exploration of Japanese American Internment, by Todd Stewart, $34.95.
The U.S. internment of more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II is one of the shabbier chapters in American history. So it’s no surprise that the country doesn’t pour money into the 10 camps to promote them as tourist sites. Most are deserted, their derelict buildings crumbling, torn down or hauled away. Amache, one of the camps, located in southeastern Colorado, for instance, is a collection of concrete slabs where buildings once stood.
Todd Stewart, an Oklahoma photographer, documents the remains of the camps in a photographic essay that intersperses contemporary photographs with historic pictures. He concentrates on the California camps but includes photos of Amache, as well as Heart Mountain in Wyoming.
Staking Her Claim: Women Homesteading the West, by Marcia Meredith Hensley, $19.95. Some 10 percent of those who homesteaded the West were women, and to our surprise, perhaps, a higher percentage of women than men proved up their land.
Women homesteaded for the same reasons men did — independence, love of the outdoors and a way to acquire land for next to nothing. But women had other motives. In the West, they were treated as equals, and they had the opportunity to break away from the limits of Victorian womanhood.
“Staking Her Claim” is a collection of writings from homesteading women, with a commentary by Wyoming writer Marcia Meredith Hensley. “The independence and freedom, together with the added responsibility of managing one’s own affairs, are irresistibly and healthfully enthralling,” wrote one woman.
Life was no easier on a homestead for a woman than a man. One female homesteader, a tubercular widow with seven children, wrote in a letter to her mother, “Last evening was the worst of all . . . the dust was so thick I could not see the bluffs . . . the east wind last week blew steady for forty-eight hours and I felt quite frazzled.”
Like their male counterparts, the lady homesteaders write about their fears and loneliness, but what comes through even clearer is pride in their hard work and their self-sufficiency.
Sandra Dallas is a Denver novelist who writes regularly about new regional nonfiction releases.
