Cover

EARLY BIRD BOOKS

FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY

LOVE TO READ?

LOVE GREAT SALES?

GET FANTASTIC DEALS ON BESTSELLING EBOOKS DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX EVERY DAY!

Desperadoes

A Novel

Ron Hansen

Dedication

For my brother, Rob

Epigraph

Of that marauding band I am the sole survivor. The rest have gone these many years, with their boots on. In fact, I am one of the very few yet alive of that whole elder school of border outlaws whose kind rides no more. And now that I am dry behind the ears I have a yearning to tell truthfully the tale of the Daltons and others of the old-timers whose lives and exploits have been so often garbled, fantastically romanticized, or vaguely related…

The tale will recount contacts with many of the less exploited desperadoes, as well as some of the more widely celebrated figures of the last frontier.

It will have dreadful and sinister things in it, of course: swift foray, desperate encounter, and the ultimate tests of reckless manhood; hot saddles, cracking guns, and last stands in a fated hour; fantastic courage and inglorious defeat—splendid things and mean, on both sides of the law’s deadline. The sowing of black oats, and the terrible harvest.

And to leaven the wild antic of hair-trigger men in hair pants, the story also will have the romantic presence of women, gentle, stoic, and tempestuous, whose lives were entwined with the destiny of outlawed Daltons.

—Emmett Dalton,

When the Daltons Rode

1

WHEN MARSHAL FRANK DALTON was murdered by whiskey runners in 1887, the federal government shipped him to Coffeyville, Kansas, in a mahogany box filled with ice. His face and hair were waxed by undertaker Lape and the body was hauled to Elmwood Cemetery in a quality black carriage with windows that did not warp what was looked at.

When my brothers Bob and Grat Dalton were shot dead in 1892, the bodies were handcuffed and stood in their stocking feet so photographs could be taken and the outlaws lay all night on a Coffeyville jail-house floor with blowflies crawling over their faces. Women came by with pinking shears to snip away bits of their hair and clothes, and the cartridges that were left in their belts sold for a dollar apiece.

And when Bill was gunned down by a marshal’s posse in 1894, he was displayed in a coffin covered with window glass until he was badly decomposed. Spectators journeyed by train from Kansas and Texas and Oklahoma, and thousands of people crowded the mortician’s parlor so they could file past and solemnly stare at the last of the notorious Daltons.