Customer Reviews

Draw: The Greatest Gunfights of the American West

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The author, who is known for his fiction writing, has penned a very readable and entertaining history of the significant gunfights of the American West. The stories are detailed without being overly lengthy. Where disagreement exists between sources, the author points this out and opines what he feels is the most likely truth. His writing style is engaging and enjoyable. No western buff should be without a copy of this book on their shelf. If you like this subject, another must read is O'Neal's Encyclopedia of Western Gunfighters.

DRAW, as its title indicates, is a study of many of the more famous gunfights and gunfighters of the Old West. It's James Reasoner's first non-fiction work, and it's a winner.

DRAW is well researched, and contains many little known anecdotes about the colorful characters that populate its pages (for example, gunfighter Clay Allison, was wont, when drunk, to strip off his clothes, and wearing nothing but his boots and hat, gallop his horse through town, shooting out windows and streetlights). The book is fast paced, and holds the reader's attention as well as, if not better than, any work of fiction. Reasoner makes the reader feel as if he or she is right there in the middle of the events he describes, while at the same time remaining true to the facts of the events, without exaggeration. This makes for a book that is both entertaining and enlightening, and never dull.

DRAW is a must read for any student, serious or casual, of the history of the American West, or for anyone who just enjoys good cowboy or lawman versus outlaw stories. As the back cover blurb says: "These are the shoot-outs and showdowns that gave the Wild West its name...recounted here with gritty accuracy, colorful detail, and all the drama of life--and death--on the frontier". This is one of those rare works that lives up in its entirety to the publisher's hype. I highly recommend it.

Overall this a great book, however I only read about 3/4 of it. I really enjoyed reading this book in the evenings before falling asleep. I'm a non-fiction reader and love adventure books like this. This book reminds me of Mark Twain's Roughing It. It also reminds me of a book on bear attacks I read years ago called Mark of the Grizzly which is fantastic. You get to know the various outlaws, gangs, and lawmen of the time. Each chapter is a short biography of one or more characters and tells the story of a well known gun fight involving those characters. It's interesting to see how the citizens of the American West decided that some murders were justified.

One reviewer said this book is repetitive, which is a little bit true, but what do you expect from a book that tells the story of the greatest gunfights of the West? There are only so many variations in the way bank robberies, holdups and gun fights can happen.

That reviewer also said the author should have used references to back up accuracy of these events. I'm okay with there not being references in this book since I read it for entertainment. The events in this book are hard to prove true, but I believe the author has done a good job in researching each of these stories. A little bit of story telling is fine with me.

I recommend this book even though I didn't finish reading it.

Well the stories were interesting, but not as interesting as they could have been because the author turned them into just "stories" and not "history." The main problem is the lack of research. There's not a single primary source listed in the bibliography. It's all taken from other people's books...this isn't history, it's a book report. The lack of primary sources turns what could have been a fascinating subject into little more than a "My First Big Book of Gunfights," full of bad guys turned into a bedtime story. If you want history, look elsewhere.

My other complaint is that the writing is, frankly, repetitive. If I had to read the phrase "soiled dove," to describe prostitutes again I was going to scream. (Seriously, he uses the phrase at least 10 times.) He reuses quite a lot of other phrases and sentence constructions as well. (Lots sentences like "he had anger in his heart and vengence in his eyes.") Perhaps not a problem if you pick this up, read one chapter, and put the book down for a bit -- but when you read it over the course of a few days it gets really annoying.

This book is a series of short vignettes, each recounting a gunbattle or incident from the Old West. The author is rather broad in his delineation of this period, so you can read stories here from the end of the Civil War through the first couple of decades of the 20th century. The interesting thing is that he stayed away from the famous gunfights. So the OK Corral, the Lincoln County War, the Northfield Minnesota Raid, and Billy the Kid only get brief mention. Instead, the author recounts gunfights that aren't as famous, though they can be as fascinating. As far as that goes, this is an interesting book.

However, it's worth noting that this book is compiled *completely* from secondary sources, or at least stuff that's in print. So John Wesley Hardin's book is part of the bibliography for his chapter, but the author didn't consult any manuscript collections or newspaper archives. If you had the money and the time, you probably could buy every book he has in his bibliography, and read all of the sources that he used to write this book. I guess he gets paid for collecting the information all in one place.

Then there's the issue of the writing style. The author's a Western Novelist, and that's fine (Shelby Foote was a novelist, and he produced a perfectly acceptable history of the Civil War), but there have to be limits to how much of the novelist remains when the author turns to writing non-fiction. Here, a lot of the novelist stayed, and at times the prose gets a little overblown, to say the least. A sheriff is a "badgepacker", a prostitute a "soiled dove", and so forth. The author tries to figure out what people were thinking in particular instances, when there's no direct evidence. At times he tells you that the sources he's used are unclear why something happened, and that's fine, but speculation about how someone feels is usually not done...

Generally, though, the text moves right along, and the stories the author tells are reasonably interesting. If you're interested in the Old West, this book may be right up your alley.

The book is a collection of about a dozen or so stories of gunfights and confrontations during the days of the Old West. A highly entertaining read, if you like Westerns, or if you like reading about lots and lots of actions, then this book is must read for you.

The book is broken down into sections of One-on-One Duels, Gangs, Posses, Holdups, Back-Shooters and Mishaps. The author cites numerous sources per account, and sorts of breaks down each account into its most basic and most important parts. What I like about the author, is that he is always careful to note what is fact, and what is speculation. Still you end up with a very good read to while your free hours away. Highly recommended.

In this book, the author describes SOME of the greatest gunfights which took place in the American West and the events leading up to them, and he does so quite well. Thirty-one stories are told in six different categories. Before reading the book, I was fairly knowledgeable of some, vaguely aware of others, and had never even heard of a few others. With regard to the former: Mr. Reasoner's stories refreshed my memory. With regard to those about which I was aware, having read about them in passing, the author explained a lot of things - e.g., exactly how and why Warren Earp was killed, and what the trouble was which led to Pat Garret's mysterious death, etc. With regard to the latter: I found some of those stories to be quite interesting, but others not so much so.

The book is well written by an author who clearly specializes in fiction, but who has done his homework. That is obvious from his method of presentation and by the words he chooses. More specifically: he is very descriptive in his writing, postulating the thoughts, feelings, and actions of the various participants in the stories he tells, and he uses expressions which the reader wouldn't normally expect to see in a purely historical biography, e.g. slap leather for drawing one's gun, owlhoots for outlaws; hoosegow for jail, soiled doves for prostitutes, etc. But this in no way diminishes the quality of his research and, in fact, enhances the stories he tells.

My only real complaint about this book is that it doesn't live up to its title. It seems to have neglected a few very prominent gunfights, including the "Gunfight at the OK corral," Jesse James' Northfield Raid, Wyatt Earp's Vendetta Ride and the shootout in which Curly Bill Brocius was killed; and the gunfight, during the Lincoln County War, in which Billy the Kid's employer, Alex McSween, and three other men were killed. It also occurred to me that some of the actions included, although interesting, couldn't really be called gun fights, e.g., John Wesley Hardin being shot in the back of the head in a saloon in El Paso while standing at the bar.

In any case: I really enjoyed this book. So what's not to like?

I purchased a copy of this book a year ago in a gift shop, appropriately enough, at the "Gateway to the West," the St. Louis Arch. Suffice to say, it proved to be the best read I've had in recent years. Combining author James Reasoner's natural storytelling talents with some reasonable conjecture, "Draw" is a wildly entertaining time machine back to the days in which the slightest provocation could lead on the spot to a lethal game of peek-a-boo with bullets, most often involving names few of us have ever heard of. Yes, there are also some fascinating accounts of familiar suspects (lawmen and/or desperadoes), such as Bat Masterson, Luke Short, Bill Tilghman, Ben Thompson and King Fisher, Henry Starr, Pat Garrett, Bob Ford, "Black Jack" Ketchum, among others, as well as also-rans, like Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson's kid brothers on their own misadventures. One of the book's best yet ironically grim features is often including the fates of each story's survivor(s) to provide an extra glimpse why so few of these guys actually lived to see glorious old age or somehow escaped into historical oblivion.

However, the true meat of this book comes from the entertaining but sometimes gruesome stories you probably didn't know, including the wily antics of Jack Slade, or a mysterious, tubercular boy named Riley who littered the Tuttle Dance Hall in a small Kansas railroad town with bodies in the early 1870's. A side note on the Tuttle Dance Hall story: beware the shoot-out's aftermath would lead to a related no-holds-barred duel a few years later that is not for the faint of heart. To the author's credit, his apt description of this nasty two-person bloodbath is vivid, but readers should perhaps think twice before proceeding further - personally, I found it stomach-churning. Otherwise, despite graphic descriptions of Old West violence, most of the stories are appropriate for the age 15+ and up crowd, particularly if you think about the macabre bungling occurring in these showdowns in which the loser often learns the deadly lesson of that it's far better to shoot slow and accurately than to shoot first. The other lesson, I suppose, instilled here is that, if one lives by the gun, then one should inevitably expect to die by the gun.

Overall, this book is for Old West enthusiasts who like to consume their favorite kind of history in a conversational tone with plausible conjecture and hefty doses of old school storytelling wit (clichés and all). I'll note that sometimes (i.e. the Jack Slade story) Reasoner starts a new anecdote with "in fact," but then soon concedes that the story may well be apocryphal, which defeats the whole purpose of claiming a story is factually true in the first place. Still, that is a relatively minor flaw since readers should know they need to absorb these sometimes fanciful accounts with some degree of skepticism.

Rating: 9/10 for entertainment value. Appropriate for ages 15+ and up for bloody descriptions of frontier mayhem.

P.S. Two other books I would recommend as companion pieces: "Legends & Lies" by Dale L. Walker, a similarly-styled book about unsolved Old West mysteries - very solid entertaining and solid minus the dubious chapter that links John Wilkes Booth's assassin to Jack the Ripper, and "Bloody Season" by Loren T. Estleman that recounts the legendary Earp-Clanton feud in classic novel form, with an epilogue describing the characters' eventual fates.

My daughter bought this for me for xmas. I'm about 3/4 done with it, but decided to go ahead and review. has Short 4-10 page stories of all the greats you've heard of and some you havent. There is also a section in the back of the book that tells you a book that tells a longer story if you want to know more detail.

The book was delivered very quickly and in the condition it was advertised as. Very satisfied.