Product Description

Gatlin was one of the breed then prevalent on the West Texas plains who would kill a man to check whether the gun was loaded.

Here, for the first time, is the true, detailed, down-and-dirty story of Tascosa, the cowboy capital of the Texas Panhandle and the hardest place on the frontier. Here at last are the facts that connect the stories of the beef bonanza, Pat Garrett s Home Rangers, the 1883 Cowboy Strike and the relentless, undeclared war that ensued between the corporation ranchers Charlie Goodnight, Alphabet Lee, Al Boyce of the XIT and the rest of them and the tough, dangerous fraternity of rustlers manipulated by Tascosa town boss Jesse Jenkins, a thirty year conflict that precipitated as gory a procession of violence and death as any frontier town ever witnessed.

As well as being the center of ranching activity in the Panhandle, Tascosa also became the last best hiding place in Texas for killers on the run, horse thieves, tinhorn gamblers, hair-trigger shootists or anyone else with a past he wanted to get away from. Billy the Kid, Poker Tom Emory, Bill Gatlin, Jim Kenedy, and Louis The Animal Bousman were just a few of the outlaws and desperadoes who vied for dominance with Cape Willingham, Cap Arrington, Jim East, and other lawmen in an ongoing war of attrition that made sudden death a routine occurrence on the town s dusty street. 139 b/w photos, 1 map

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #331281 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-01
• Released on: 2007-06-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 384 pages

Review
"Mention the Old West Texas Panhandle Town of Tascosa to most people and they might make a vague association with its last resident, Frenchy McCormik, or, maybe, Boot Hill Cemetery. Such sketchy recognition begs to be informed by Frederick Nolan's extensively researched and crisply written account of Tascosa's self-absorbed, isolated outlaw past." --Russell Sparling, Panhandle-Plains Historical Review Vol. LXXIX "...Nolan's narrative is no scissors-and-paste hodgepodge. This book itself is well designed and features pictures of all the principal characters... Old Tascosa's story has finally be properly told." --Bill Neal, Western Historical Quarterly Autumn 2008

About the Author
Frederick Nolan is the author of The West of Billy the Kid; The Wild West: History, Myth and the Making of America, and many other works of fiction and non-fiction.

Customer Reviews

The Definitive History of Old Tascosa
In his Introduction, western historian Frederick Nolan says, "Tascosa is gone, dissolved, and blown away by the rains and winds of history. It is not even a ghost town." Although that may be physically true, Nolan has successfully resurrected the town with this definitive history.

It is all here in "Tascosa, Its Life and Gaudy Times," the legends, the real stories, often told from three or four differing points-of-view: The Beef Bonanza, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, John Selman's "Regulators," Charles Goodnight, the XIT, the Rocking Chair, the Frying Pan, and other Panhandle ranches, as well as the the Cowboy Strike of 1883 immortalized in Elmer Kelton's "The Day The Cowboys Quit." Nolan offers up all of it, and the stories practically tell themselves.

The town started out as a gathering place for buffalo hunters. Situated on the Canadian River and a hundred miles from Fort Elliott, the collected adobe buildings went by the name of Hidetown for a while, then became Atascosa. However, in 1878, when the town fathers applied for a post office, they were turned down because a town by that name already existed in South Texas. So the first "A" was amputated and the town of Tascosa was officially born.

The new town was wild and woolly, loaded with hotheads, scarlet women, drunken cowboys, and gamblers. Cattle rustling seems to have been a weekend pastime. After barbed wire appeared, fences began to go up without benefit of surveys or clear title. What law existed was ineffective, and almost immediately, Boot Hill began filling with graves.

Several chapters of the book are devoted to the Cowboy Strike, the feud and infamous shoot-out that happened as a result. Nolan does a good job of sorting out the various "sides" to the story, not an easy task as almost everybody who lived in Tascosa was involved. He uses many colorful quotes from grand jury testimonies and from contemporary newspaper interviews that help to give a clear picture of the rough, post-Civil War era in Texas.

It was a time of transition and Tascosa was a transitional town. In it's heyday it boasted a newspaper, a blacksmith, a hotel, livery stables, numerous saloons, a public school, a drugstore, several general mercantile stores, and a barber shop. But it didn't last long.

In 1887, came the big die-up, when blizzards raged across the plains states, dropping temperatures to below zero for several days straight. It was estimated that 80 percent of the cattle on the range perished. Even some of the largest cattle ranches went under. Smaller ones were decimated. Then in 1888, the Fort Worth and Denver, Colorado railway came through the Panhandle, bypassing Tascosa and dealt the town the coup de grace. In a little over a decade, Tascosa had gone from boomtown to a dusty spot in the road between Amarillo and Dalhart.

I cannot imagine that there is anything of the history of Tascosa that Frederick Nolan has missed. The amount of research this work contains is almost staggering. I found myself wondering time and again how he ever unearthed the often obscure bits and pieces he uses to reconstruct the history. His writing is even and fluid, and moves the reader along at a quick pace. The only addition I would have personally liked would have been a map of the Panhandle, in order to place old Tascosa in its proper surrounding.

More To The Story...
"Tascosa" is worth reading as a follow up to earlier books about this little gunslinger town in the Texas Panhandle, Maverick Town, The Story of Old Tascosa by McCarty and The LS Brand, by Dulcie Sullivan.

My interest in the subject is related to a character in the book and possibly his photo on the front cover, lower lefthand side. Another photo inside the book caught my interest because of a glaring inaccuracy. I know it is inaccurate because my great grandfather is J.E. McAllister.

The family photo misidentifies the child sitting on his lap as his son, when the child is my grandmother. Her older brother is the other child.

I don't know about other "facts" in the book, whether our family history has coverups or whether the author's research reflects opinions of less than honest characters with their own agendas. I do appreciate the lengthy references in the back of the book because it is a subject that always interests me.