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Shot All To Hell LP: Jesse James, The Northfield Raid, And The Wild West's Greatest Escape (2013)

by Mark Lee Gardner(Favorite Author)

4.04 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0062201514 (ISBN13: 9780062201515)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

HarperLuxe

review 1: I can’t say that reading about Jesse James was ever on high on my list, but after hearing Mark Lee Gardner on the radio discussing this book, I just had to run out and get it. What a fascinating read! I’m not one of those who had a Jesse fascination as a boy, unlike Bobby Brady, but I do remember driving from St. Peter to Mankato and looking into the caves along Highway 169 and wondering if the James and Young treasure was buried there. In fact, the whole Jesse James thing was rather ruined for me by some movie made back in the 1970s (something about the “Great MN Raid”) that my mother took me to – all I remember is that it was the first time I saw a woman’s breasts on the big screen. I don’t remember who was mortified more, me or Mom. Anywho, Gardener h... moreas really done his research. I really like his style as it’s not very editorial – he’s pretty much quoting sources and interviews from the time. The account of the James/Younger escape from Northfield to other parts of Minnesota is riveting – and it could have been really boring. It helped that I grew up in the area and could imagine the cities/roads/trails described, but I think I would have enjoyed this if I didn’t know the area. A fascinating read!
review 2: Isenberg, Andrew, Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, Hill and Wang (Farrar Strauss andGiroux), New York 2013 (296 pp. $30)Gardner, Mark Lee, Shot All to Hell: Jesse James, The Northfield Raid, and the Wild West’s Greatest Escape, William Morrow (Harper Collins), New York, 2013 (309 pp. $27.99)Like the Lincolns half a generation before them, the Earps migrated from the semi-feudal upper South of Kentucky, crossed the Ohio River, and settled in rapidly commercializing central Illinois where Walter Earp (the pater familias) and his large clan of sons, daughters and a few grandchildren, entertained fantasies of success in farming and town politics.Nicholas, Wyatt’s father, failed soon enough, moved to Iowa, moved to California on the Overland Trail, then dragged his family, including sons Wyatt, James and Morgan, back to Iowa and then Illinois again. Older son Virgil had already established himself as a wanderer, booty lawman and tax farmer. Wyatt, cut loose from any notion of settled life, undertook at first to steal a horse in Indian Territory, was jailed, escaped, and entered thereafter into what would become his permanent vocation as an itinerant gambler, pimp, enforcer and, like his brother Virgil, a booty town lawman.There are, of course, many Earp biographies, most famously Stuart Lake’s 1931 confabulation, which established Wyatt’s legend as The Virtuous Western Hero. Andrew Isenberg, author of the inestimably valuable and sad The Destruction of the Bison, adds greatly to what is currently known about Earp and his social era by not only assembling a meticulous personal history of the man and his brothers, but by illuminating an entire social milieu erected on the foundations of saloon gambling, prostitution sheltered by official town policy, cattle rustling as small-time entrepreneurship, and county politics as “legal theft”.For example, Wyatt’s career in Wichita (which lasted barely two years), saw him established as a city policeman who earned a share of the fines imposed on drunks and miscreants, a card sharp who dealt a particularly mean brand of faro to Texas cattle drovers, and an enforcer in his brother Jim’s brothel across the Arkansas River where town law didn’t reach. In fall, when the cowboys left Wichita, Wyatt followed them to Texas and dealt crooked faro there. Wyatt emphatically was not a gunfighter or a lawman; rather, he was a tall, tough, hard-to-reach con artist who, because he didn’t touch alcohol, almost always had an advantage over his cowboy adversaries. In Tombstone, in 1881-2, he dealt faro for a living and pursued a family vendetta against the Clantons and other Cowboys in what amounted to “honor culture” killings straight out of the social comic book of Kentucky.Beautifully rendered as a portrait of the underbelly of mining and cattle town life in the 1870s and 1880s, this new biography is a gem, and includes a touching look at Wyatt’s single life-long friendship with Doc Holliday. In later life, Wyatt continued to pursue his gambling interests through the medium of racing horses and selling bogus mining claims. He ran saloons in a number of odd-ball boom towns like Goldfield and Tonopah in Nevada (where Virgil joined him) and Eagle, in Idaho. Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, provides the reader with a fine bibliography, along with some delightful photos.Mark Lee Gardner is an independent historian and the author of a splendid life of Billy the Kid called To Hell on a Fast Horse, probably the definitive book about William Bonny. Shot All to Hell—the story of the James-Younger gang’s assault on Northfield Minnesota’s First National Bank (2pm, September 7, 1876) is a gloriously detailed and superbly written chronicle of what turned out to be a disaster for the eight-member crew of border ruffians, sadists and thieves.Unlike the Earps, Jesse James, Frank his brother, and the Youngers (Cole, Jim and Bob) were plain-Jane criminals who often hid under the coattails of the Confederate Cause to justify their train and bank robberies. As teenagers, they had ridden with Bloody Bill Anderson, becoming skilled horsemen, excellent marksmen, and practiced murderers before turning sixteen. Riding together, the eight (Frank and Jesse, Cole, Jim and Bob Younger, later joined by Clell Miller, Charlie Pitts and Bill Chadwell), wore long tan dusters, big spurs and wide-brimmed hats. Armed with rifles and pistols, they were, in 1876, at the top of their game and must have presented an awesome and frightening sight to behold.Shot All to Hell is without doubt the most detailed rendering of the assault on Northfield ever written, vividly evoking the town’s minute-by-minute response, the chase after six survivors across the lake and swamp country of south central Minnesota, the capture of Cole and the killing of his brothers, and the eventual escape of Frank and Jesse, the latter of whom returned to St. Joseph and took up life as a horse breeder and trader. Throughout the book are fascinating personal portraits of the sheriffs, posse members, farmers and town-folk who stood up to the gang and pursued them for weeks.Taken together, Wyatt Earp and Shot All to Hell offer the reader an exciting glimpse into vanished forms of American life. The field of Western history has now entered a phaseof precision scholarship, deep research and glorious writing that Stuart Lake in 1931could hardly have imagined. less

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