Age of the Gunfighter: Men and Weapons on the Frontier 1840-1900

Based upon contemporary and informed opinion, Age of the Gunfighter tells of a tempestuous time and many a notorious gunfighter. Few of those who achieved fame and a reputation lived into old age. Ed Masterson, Tom Smith, and Bill Tilghman, for example, died in the line of duty. Others, like Wild Bill Hickok, Jesse James, and Billy the Kid, were murdered because of their reputations, at the hands of the law or for personal or financial gain. And the few who survived into old age in the twentieth century, such as Wyatt Earp, were men out of place and time, steeped in nostalgia for an era gone but immortalized as the age of the gunfighter.

Joseph G. Rosa, (1932–2015), is the author of the definitive biography of Wild Bill Hickok, They Called Him Wild Bill: The Life and Adventures of James Butler Hickok, as well as The Gunfighter: Man or Myth? And (with Waldo E. Koop) Rowdy Joe Lowe: Gambler with a Gun, all published by the University of Oklahoma Press.