Badge Rot: The Frontier Sheriff Autopsy
The frontier sheriff you were never told about.
He wasn't fast. He wasn't fearless. Most nights, he wasn't even sober.
The frontier sheriff of American myth - steel-eyed, incorruptible, alone against the mob - never rode into a single real town.
What did exist was a broke, overworked, chronically underpaid man with a jurisdiction bigger than some European countries, a salary that forced him to take bribes just to eat, and a badge that offered zero protection from the lynch mobs he was supposed to stop.
BADGE ROT performs the autopsy Hollywood never wanted.
Using a five-phase forensic framework - The Badge Autopsy - this book cuts through a century and a half of dime-novel varnish to expose:
The fee-based pay structures that turned frontier lawmen into bounty-hunting bureaucrats... the whiskey that kept them upright through a job no man was built to survive sober... the cattle barons and coal companies who bought entire sheriff's offices outright... the mobs that overpowered them again and again, because one man with a revolver was never a match for seventy-five with rope and a grievance... and the dime novelists who buried every inconvenient fact under a better story, the moment a better story became more profitable than the truth.
This is the sheriff as he actually smelled - unwashed leather, cheap whiskey, cordite, and fear - and the law as it actually failed, one impossible mile at a time.
Drawing on more than thirty years in public safety, including twelve in executive leadership, and a lifelong study of U.S. and world history, author Tobin Scott brings a rare, dual-lens perspective to this reckoning: part investigator, part historian, no myth left standing.
If you thought you knew the man behind the star - you didn't.
Related Subjects
HistoryCustomer Reviews
ThriftBooks ® and the ThriftBooks ® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
