This is Dee Brown's most remarkable work on non-fiction since the legendary 'Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee'. In this new book he strips the Hollywood facade away from the Old West to reveal the truth about the lives of the pioneers. He shows their huge ambition as they kept pushing the frontiers ever further west, and the hardship and cruelty they suffered in pursuit of their goals. He demonstrates their bawdy, caustic and often violent humour in the face of boredom on the one hand and terrifying danger on the other. He draws on newspapers, diaries and the observations of writers as diverse as Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and Robert Louis Stevenson, to bring together this highly entertaining collection of tales of the pioneer women, lawmen, outlaws, schoolteachers, cowboys, tenderfeet and prostitutes as they made their way out west.
