Four Against the West: The True Saga of a Frontier Family That Reshaped the Nation--And Created a Legend

A thrilling true saga of legendary Texas figure Judge Roy Bean and his brothers―and their violent adventures in Wild West America.

Roy Bean was an American saloon-keeper and Justice of the Peace in Texas, who called himself "The Only Law West of the Pecos". He and his three brothers set out from Kentucky in the mid 1840s, heading into the American frontier to find their fortunes. Their lifetimes of triumphs, tragedies, laurels and scandals will play out on the battlefields of Mexico, in shady dealings in California city halls, inside eccentric saloon courtrooms of Texas, and along the blood-soaked Santa Fe Trail from Missouri to Mexico. They will kill men, and murder will likewise stalk them.

The Beans chase their American dreams as the nation reinvents itself as a coast-to-coast powerhouse, only to be tested by the Civil War. During their saga, the brothers become soldiers, judges, husbands, guerillas, lawmen, entrepreneurs, refugees, fathers, politicians, pioneers and - in Judge Roy Bean's case - one of the Old West's best known but least understood scoundrels.

Using new information gleaned from exhaustive research, Joe Pappalardo's Four Against the West is an unprecedented and vivid telling of the intertwined stories of all four Bean brothers, exploring for the first time how their relentless ambitions helped create a new America.

JOE PAPPALARDO is the author of the critically acclaimed books Red Sky Morning: The Epic True Story of Texas Ranger Company F; Inferno: The True Story of a B-17 Gunner’s Heroism and the Bloodiest Military Campaign in Aviation History; Sunflowers: The Secret History and Spaceport Earth: The Reinvention of Spaceflight. Pappalardo is a freelance journalist and former associate editor of Air & Space Smithsonian magazine, a writing contributor to National Geographic magazine, a contributor to Texas Monthly, and a former senior editor at Popular Mechanics. He has appeared on C-Span, CNN, Fox News and television shows on the Science Channel and the History Channel.