Fans pick 84 books like Old Deadwood Days

This is one of many Wild West autobiographies posted in various formats at the invaluable and for the most part free to use Archive.org. The book is remarkable because it’s one long excuse for the author’s many murders. Hardin—far from the sympathetic figure portrayed in Bob Dylan’s “John Wesley Harding” (with an extra “g”)—comes across as a vicious racist and dissembler. He maintains that the people he shot all but begged him to finish them off. Remarkably, he became a lawyer before being plugged himself. 

Like many of the period books, this one has to be seen in context. It was written just eight months after Garrett shot William Bonney, so the story is at least fresh. But subsequent scholars have found the story to be full of holes and self-serving versions of history. But it makes fascinating reading, because shooter and victim had a history. According to Garrett, the Kid’s last words were in Spanish, “Quien es?” (“Who is it?”)

By some estimates, a quarter of the cowboys on the frontier were African-Americans. I tell some of their stories in my Outlaws book, but this is a much more complete account. Some of the prominent figures of color—Nat Love, Bass Reeves, Rufus Buck, Cherokee Bill, Jim Beckwourth—are portrayed in the 2021 Netflix movie They Harder They Fall, but any resemblance to actual history in that film is purely coincidental. 

Why isn’t Soapy Smith better known? He was one of the most outrageous con men who ever lived, and would make a fine subject for a film. After a colorful life of fleecing people with three-card monte and bunco of every description (and getting run out of Denver), he turned up in Skagway, Alaska during the Gold Rush of 1896, and his gambling parlor took the miners for every penny. He was finally gunned down in 1898. 

The HBO series was great, but the book was even better.

Prior viewing of the series in no way detracted from my enjoyment of this book. Dexter’s writing is quirky and unique. Existential insights are slipped seamlessly into scenes of violence and vulgarity. The sacred and profane coexist in ways that shatter notions of duality.

As someone who has lived in the West most of my adult life and studied Western history in depth, I appreciated his nuanced exposure of humanity in the midst of darkness on the frontier. Also, this Western novel features unique female characters who defy stereotypes, which are rare in the Western genre. 

If you’re a fan of Deadwood or, going further back, the 1953 Doris Day movie, Calamity Jane, you will be fascinated by Jones’s book about the buckskin-wearing Martha Jane Canary, a.k.a. Calamity Jane. Details about her life are either sparse or exaggerated, so Jones tells us what the frontier legend has symbolized, both in her own time and in ours. Dressing like a man made her stand out and made her the object of both derision and decades of bad biographies. She still serves as a symbol of the way that women could defy expectations in the West, and Jones’s book gives us a Calamity Jane we can root for.

Richard Matheson’s career was as prolific as it was varied. He’s best known for I Am Legend, What Dreams May Come, and The Incredible Shrinking Man, to say nothing of his Twilight Zone episodes, but he also wrote the Spur Award-winning Journal of The Gun Years and its companion novel The Memoirs of Wild Bill Hickock – huge influences on my own found document novel. A number of his western shorts are collected here. Most notable in terms of weird westerns is the cleverly titled "Gunsight," the story of a blind lawman preparing to defend himself from a band of approaching killers a la High Noon.

I’ve been to the Tomboy Mine. All that’s left of the camp are old foundations in a rocky basin above timberline, surrounded by high peaks, 3,000 feet above Telluride. The only gold left behind is in the rich hues of a Colorado sunset. While the Tomboy may be gone, it’s the same view Harriet Fish Backus saw every day. Life at a remote mountain mine was full of “mishaps and makeshifts,” and she kept a diary of daily events. Nothing she writes is a dull description, nor is it the soaring purple prose of Victorian-era romanticism. Her account of mining life in 1906, from a woman’s perspective, detailing daily routines, friendships, and fears, is invaluable as a western author, to create believable female characters in the Old West.

The Broken Gun has one of the tightest plots of any of the many Western novels from the late, great Louis L’Amour. L’Amour’s Westerns are almost all set in the mid-1800s. His good guys are good, and his bad guys bad. His books are all fun, easy to read, full of action, and keep you turning the pages. Some readers think Louis L’Amour was a 2nd rate writer…but he knew what he was doing & literally millions of folks have loved his books. Many, like myself, have read all of his Westerns, some of them several times. When I go camping I always toss in a few of his paperbacks. When it’s too windy to fish, I kick back and re-read a Louis L’Amour Western. Always fun.

This book isn’t fiction, but it feels like it. I am wrapped in the reality of the frontier through letters, diaries, recipes, and great old photos–every time I pick it up. And that’s often.

I first gave this book to my mother, but my husband paged through it so many hours each time we visited that I gave him his own copy. Cooking on the trail, on cattle drives, in camps, and finally, on hardscrabble ranches and farms isn’t easy. The book is full of struggles, and I feel for the women who wrested survival out of the earth daily.

They write about being driven crazy by the relentless wind, shortages, and loneliness, but there are plenty of jolly–it’s the best word for their beaming faces–pictures. I love what those old photos show: an appreciation for nature, family, and farm animals, and their determination to have tea parties and make… show more.