Wild West Volume 8 Rattlesnake Blues: Dispatches from a Snakebit Territory

Book by Banks, Leo W.

Leo W. Banks grew up in Boston, a city laden with history. As a schoolboy, he delved into history as a hobby, and he "published" books based on his reading and other research.

Mostly, his books dealt with the Civil War. He would read articles about the war and its generals and then write his version of the stories, typing them and hand-binding the pages. He even got his father, a mathematics professor, to write glowing instroductions for the books.

His heroes included two southern generals, Stonewall Jackson, and Robert E. Lee, and his reading brought to him places like Gettysburg and Bull Run.

He graduated from Boston College in 1975 with a degree in history and moved to Arizona the following year. In 1977 he received a master's degree in journalism from the University of Arizona in Tucson.

For the past 20 years Leo has traveled extensively in Arizona to research libraries, archives, and other repositories of historical information. His special interest has focused on the territorial years and the Apache wars. He has written numerous articles on the subject for Arizona Highways magazine, for which he began to write a decade ago. His travels also gave him much material for travel and adventure stories for the magazine.

He has contributed many articles for books published by Arizona Highways. He wrote the historical stories in Grand Canyon Stories: Then and Now, published in September, 1999, and he wrote most of the stories in Days of Destiny and Manhunts and Massacres, part of the Wild West Collection. And he is one of the authors of Travel Arizona II, a guidebook.

He has worked as a reporter for the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson, and as a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and Boston Globe. He has written numerous articles for Sports Illustrated, and other magazines, including National Geographic Traveler.

Leo lives in Tucson with his wife, Teresa, and son, Patrick.