![\"Book](\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/heroesandoutlawsoftheoldwest.jpg\")
I asked yesterday<\/a> whether you thought I would delve into a book that I bought over the weekend or if I would read another movie tie-in book next. Hah! Gentle reader, as you well know, this is an example of a false dilemma<\/em>. As it turns out, I picked up a thin children’s (I dare say it’s younger than Young Adult, but who knows in the 21st century?) book about, well, the title says it all, I suppose. I bought this book in 2012<\/a> along with Hud<\/em> and a couple of M*A*S*H<\/em> books, which might make this movie\/television tie-in adjacent. That, and the other thing that we will get to.<\/p>\nThe book is 128 pages of quick read–it took me about two hours start to finish. It lists, alphabetically, a variety of lawmen or outlaws from the frontier days (which means the latter half of the nineteenth century and maybe the first decade of the 20th–it’s amazing how not<\/em> long ago this was). It’s got some of the usual suspects–Jesse James, Black Bart, Butch Cassidy and the Sunset Kid–and it pretty much has everyone from the Lincoln County War<\/a>, including Billy the Kid amd Charlie Bowdre, so one wonders if the author was a fan of the film Young Guns<\/a><\/em> which came out in 1988 (and the sequel in 1990).<\/p>\n The information within is perhaps dubious–it espouses the view that Butch Cassidy survived the shoot-out in Bolivia<\/a> among other things. And it has something of a message, as all the outlaws die young by violence, and all the lawmen live to an old age after they retire in their 40s.<\/p>\n So a good idea book if you’re looking for things to write about in the old west, but probably not a source you’d want to cite. And, as I mentioned, a quick read even if it took me nine years to get to it.<\/p>\n