Terry C Treadwell, Outlaws of the Wild West (Frontline, 2021)
The saloon doors swish open, the piano stops playing, and everyone goes silent and looks to see who has entered. It is the gunfighter, a notorious outlaw as seen on the Wanted Dead or Alive poster pinned outside the sheriff’s office. He is here for trouble, and you better keep out of his way. At least that is how the legend goes as captured in the dime novels, movies, and TV shows about the American Wild West. Terry Treadwell’s compilation of real outlaws in the late 19th Century frontier country paints a different picture, one where romance is often replaced by savage reality.
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Treadwell’s thirty-eight criminal histories cover the usual suspects – Butch and Sundance, the James brothers, Billy the Kid – and strips them of their mythologies. Most of his readers will have heard of those and probably won’t be that surprised that the glitter of Hollywood is mostly fairy dust. Some readers will also recognise the ‘Cowboys’, the Dalton brothers, the Wild Bunch, and the surprisingly disappointing Calamity Jane. Treadwell’s exploration into the lesser known outlaws, however, reveals a wide diaspora of criminals from different racial and ethnic groups and class backgrounds. No one, it seems, was immune from the criminality ‘gene’, and the degree of lawlessness did not appear to depend on any background trait either, except perhaps bad luck or poor decision-making. Indeed, Treadwell highlights some truly psychopathic individuals like Cullen Baker and William Longley, among others.
On the face of it, Treadwell’s compilation of stories is a well-written, entertaining collection, but reading them all in one go will wear down your good humour. His stories are also illustrated with photographs – many outlaws enjoyed having their portrait taken, though Treadwell includes many of their sharply contrasting posed death photographs that frontier law enforcement enjoyed equally. Dig deeper into these stories, however, and you discover a Wild West scarred by racism and bigotry, a failure of capitalism on the fringes, and, of course, violence and vigilantism. In that regard, Outlaws of the Wild West is more than a collection of stories but a thought-provoking exposure of a fissure in American history.
