Death of a Gunfighter: The Quest for Jack Slade, the West's Most Elusive Legend

by Dan Rottenberg

Book Overview

"A superb biography"-Foreword Reviews

"An ambitious, well-written effort to restore a Wild West desperado to history.... Readers will surely remember Jack Slade from henceforth. A treat for Western history buffs and fans of true crime."-Kirkus Reviews

"An enjoyable read, and it is also a heroic effort."-Wall Street Journal

"Every bit the page-turner as Roughing It, with one added advantage-Rottenberg's...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1594161127
• ISBN13: 9781594161124
• Release Date: April 2010
• Publisher: Westholme Publishing
• Length: 520 Pages
• Weight: 2.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 5.9" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

An American Classic

by Caroline Dunlop Millett 4/12/09 Although most reviews gave "Death of a Gunfighter" 5.0 out of 5 stars, these scores aren't good enough. They fail to recognize this superb biography as a classic: one of those rare works which opens up a whole new realm of thought, a new way of understanding what our culture is today. All at the same time Dan Rottenberg gives us political, military, economic --- and perhaps most importantly, cultural history. For example, his comparisons of the British and French social interactions (as they evolved on the frontier) explain much about the evolution of our peculiarly "American Character". Focusing the book on the life of one compelling personality, Jack Slade, makes for a very good story. Sometimes it is so exciting it's hard to believe. But Rottenberg makes his case, after fifty years of meticulous research. We become convinced that Slade literally opened up the West with his un-matched executive skills, fiendish law enforcements, and masterful marketing techniques. With a great deal of help from Mark Twain, Slade created the myth of the "American Gunfighter". Other reviews have been critical of "Death of a Gunfighter" since so few facts are available about Slade and his glamorous wife. It is true that Rottenberg writes within realm of myths, which I think makes the book even more valuable, more mysterious, more exciting. Would that this wonderful book had been available when I was teaching U.S. history to bored teenagers! Jack Slade would have woke them up and made them pay attention.

review, Death of a Gunfighter

I loved the book because it is true western history. It describes places I have seen, but did'nt know the historical significance. The book kept me interested from beginning to end, and now I want to take a road trip to see this part of the USA with new insight.

Not the Lone Ranger

Jack Slade was no Lone Ranger but a roughneck teamster who opened the Overland Trail from Missouri to California, creating a vital link between Washington and the California gold fields. A ruthless defender of his freight lines and the short-lived Pony Express, his violent, drunken binges finally bought about his own end. Of two personalities, Jack Slade killed some and was feared by many. Mark Twain mythologized him as a gunslinger. Yet the stagecoach passengers who stopped at his relay stations found him polite and gentlemanly. His wife truly loved him but it's hard imagine why. True, he adopted an orphan boy but he himself had instigated the senseless slaughter of the boy's family. He gleefully cut the live ears off a helpless enemy and carried them in his pocket. He drove his horses to death. Like Shiva, he was first a herculean trailblazer and then a destroyer of the very civilization he created. There's plenty to chew on here: who knew that California gold financed Lincoln's army and saved the Union? That Indians believed the telegraph carried the voice of their god? Author Dan Rottenberg paints a very big--and fascinating--picture of the times. Slade emerges as a small figure on this landscape as if in a grainy Matthew Grady photograph. As a writer long involved with the Southwest, I was intrigued by these details of our early commercial development and greatly impressed by the stamina of men such as Slade. Hero or fool? Author Rottenberg leaves the question open and provides plenty of archival sources for the next researcher: Notes, Appendix and Index take up almost a quarter of the volume. A really good read: I couldn't put it down.

Death of a Gunfighter

This book provides a great insight into that part of the U.S. lying between Missouri and California in the years before the Civil War. There were lots of heroes, not just Jack Slade. The men who sacrificed their personal finances to buy the stagecoaches from New Hampshire, to find drivers willing to risk their lives to carry people and mail, to establish roads, to build stations every 12 miles or so to accommodate the passengers, to obtain horses to be kept at each station == was an enormous undertaking. The riders and drivers were themselves courageous as were the travelers, ordinary Americans seeking fortune in the West. This book tells it all in just the right amount of detail. Prodigiously researched. Easy to read. A true contribution to U.S. history.

Frontier Capitalism and a Real Gunman

This a book that should appeal to anyone who's interested in economic history or general American history. Like the biographers who tackle Shakespeare, Rottenberg is writing about someone who hasn't left us a lot of information. He fills in the gaps-- as the Shakespeareans do-- by giving us a picture of the kind of things his subject was doing. In the Shakespeare biographies, we get a picture of the London stage in Elizabethen times. Rottenberg gives us engaging chapters on frontier capitalism-- the adventures of the men who set up ox-drawn freight lines in the decades before the transcontinental railroad connected the West Coast with the rest of the United States. Slade worked for these companies as a wagon master and then a section boss, responsible for hundreds of miles of vital, difficult trail. If you like books like Stephen Ambrose's history of the transcontinental railroad, Nothing Like It in the World, you will find these chapters just as fascinating as I did. Rottenberg has worked for the Wall Street Journal and he has a good feel for the romance and turbulence of frontier business ventures, including the history of the Pony Express. Slade, as he concludes, remains an enigmatic figure. But that's partly because Hollywood has given us a simple good guy/bad guy picture of the West. Slade was a human being, with all the contradictions of real people. He carried out some rough, important jobs and did things no Western knight is supposed to do. He was also a young man who might have become less troublesome if he had made it past his early thirties. Rottenberg has collected all the information available on Slade and lets us draw our own conclusions. But he's also created a memorable look at the American West during a period that includes the decades before the Civil War and some of the war's most critical events.