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Death of a Gunfighter: The Quest for Jack Slade, The West's Most Elusive Legend | 
 enlarge | Author: Dan Rottenberg
Publisher: Westholme Publishing
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
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Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 55567
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 536
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 5.9 x 1.8
ISBN: 1594160708
Dewey Decimal Number: 910
EAN: 9781594160707
ASIN: 1594160708
Publication Date: October 24, 2008
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Product Description
The Truth Behind the Tragic Hero Who Helped Save the Union and Created the Myth of the American Gunslinger "There was such magic in that name, SLADE! I stood always ready to drop any subject in hand, to listen to something new about Slade. . . . Slade was at once the most bloody, the most dangerous and the most valuable citizen that inhabited the savage fastnesses of the mountains."--Mark Twain, Roughing It In 1859, as the United States careened toward civil war, Washington's only northern link with America's richest state, California, was a stagecoach line operating between Missouri and the Pacific. Yet the stage line was plagued by outlaws and hostile Indians. At this critical moment, the company enlisted a former wagon train captain to clean up its most dangerous division. Over the next three years, Jack Slade exceeded his employers' wildest dreams, capturing bandits and horse thieves and driving away gangs. He kept the stagecoaches and the U.S. Mail running, and helped launch the Pony Express, securing California and its gold for the Union. Across the Great Plains he became known as "The Law West of Kearny." Slade's legend grew when he was shot and left for dead, only to survive and exact revenge on his would-be killer. But once Slade had restored the peace, his life descended into an alcoholic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde nightmare, transforming him from a courageous leader, charming gentleman, and devoted husband into a vicious, quicktriggered ruffian, who finally lost his life at the hands of vigilantes. Since Slade's death in 1864, persistent myths and stories have defied the efforts of writers and historians to capture the real Jack Slade. Despite his notoriety and place in history as the first celebrity gunfighter, the pieces of Slade's fascinating life--including his marriage to the beautiful Maria Virginia--have remained scattered and hidden. In Death of a Gunfighter: The Quest for Jack Slade, the West's Most Elusive Legend, journalist Dan Rottenberg assembles more than fifty years of research to reveal the true story of Jack Slade, one of America's greatest tragic heroes.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1 more reviews...
 review, Death of a Gunfighter January 7, 2009
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I loved the book because it is true western history. It describes places I have seen, but did'nt know the historical significance. The book kept me interested from beginning to end, and now I want to take a road trip to see this part of the USA with new insight.
Not the Lone Ranger January 2, 2009
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Jack Slade was no Lone Ranger but a roughneck teamster who opened the Overland Trail from Missouri to California, creating a vital link between Washington and the California gold fields. A ruthless defender of his freight lines and the short-lived Pony Express, his violent, drunken binges finally bought about his own end.
Of two personalities, Jack Slade killed some and was feared by many. Mark Twain mythologized him as a gunslinger. Yet the stagecoach passengers who stopped at his relay stations found him polite and gentlemanly. His wife truly loved him but it's hard imagine why. True, he adopted an orphan boy but he himself had instigated the senseless slaughter of the boy's family. He gleefully cut the live ears off a helpless enemy and carried them in his pocket. He drove his horses to death. Like Shiva, he was first a herculean trailblazer and then a destroyer of the very civilization he created.
There's plenty to chew on here: who knew that California gold financed Lincoln's army and saved the Union? That Indians believed the telegraph carried the voice of their god? Author Dan Rottenberg paints a very big--and fascinating--picture of the times. Slade emerges as a small figure on this landscape as if in a grainy Matthew Grady photograph. As a writer long involved with the Southwest, I was intrigued by these details of our early commercial development and greatly impressed by the stamina of men such as Slade. Hero or fool? Author Rottenberg leaves the question open and provides plenty of archival sources for the next researcher: Notes, Appendix and Index take up almost a quarter of the volume. A really good read: I couldn't put it down.
Death of a Gunfighter January 2, 2009
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book provides a great insight into that part of the U.S. lying between Missouri and California in the years before the Civil War. There were lots of heroes, not just Jack Slade. The men who sacrificed their personal finances to buy the stagecoaches from New Hampshire, to find drivers willing to risk their lives to carry people and mail, to establish roads, to build stations every 12 miles or so to accommodate the passengers, to obtain horses to be kept at each station == was an enormous undertaking. The riders and drivers were themselves courageous as were the travelers, ordinary Americans seeking fortune in the West. This book tells it all in just the right amount of detail. Prodigiously researched. Easy to read. A true contribution to U.S. history.
Frontier Capitalism and a Real Gunman December 31, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This a book that should appeal to anyone who's interested in economic history or general American history.
Like the biographers who tackle Shakespeare, Rottenberg is writing about someone who hasn't left us a lot of information. He fills in the gaps-- as the Shakespeareans do-- by giving us a picture of the kind of things his subject was doing. In the Shakespeare biographies, we get a picture of the London stage in Elizabethen times. Rottenberg gives us engaging chapters on frontier capitalism-- the adventures of the men who set up ox-drawn freight lines in the decades before the transcontinental railroad connected the West Coast with the rest of the United States. Slade worked for these companies as a wagon master and then a section boss, responsible for hundreds of miles of vital, difficult trail. If you like books like Stephen Ambrose's history of the transcontinental railroad, Nothing Like It in the World, you will find these chapters just as fascinating as I did. Rottenberg has worked for the Wall Street Journal and he has a good feel for the romance and turbulence of frontier business ventures, including the history of the Pony Express.
Slade, as he concludes, remains an enigmatic figure. But that's partly because Hollywood has given us a simple good guy/bad guy picture of the West. Slade was a human being, with all the contradictions of real people. He carried out some rough, important jobs and did things no Western knight is supposed to do. He was also a young man who might have become less troublesome if he had made it past his early thirties.
Rottenberg has collected all the information available on Slade and lets us draw our own conclusions. But he's also created a memorable look at the American West during a period that includes the decades before the Civil War and some of the war's most critical events.
 The Prototype December 20, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Jack Slade was the prototype of the American Western Outlaw. At one point, he was a trusted vilgilante dealing harsh justice in a harsh world (check out the advert inside the book for men for the Pony Express, where it declares a preference for "orphans"). On the other-hand, Jack Slade was a murderous, drunken sort. He is hard to pin down, and thus was a legendary character, even during his life. Mark Twain's infatuation with Slade is constantly being referred to. And it makes sense that Twain would use elements of the Slade myth in his own literary creations.
I had never heard of Jack Slade before. I wonder if he is one of those names lost to history. There's certaintly not a huge amount of certifiable information about him, and this is where Rottenberg really excells; finding and using each bit of information he can. The book has an extensive list of references.
Like I said, I had never heard of Jack Slade before. I don't really like westerns. In fact, I came across this book on a table in Barnes & Noble and I skimmed over the jacket. What attracted me to "Death of a Gunfighter: The Quest for Jack Slade" was the history and the mystery of it all. Jack Slade certainly qualifies as mysterious. Several times he had been left for dead, only to turn up in another town. Indeed, "the stories of [his] death have been greatly exagerated."
Rottenberg does a good job of disecting the turth from the myth, the tall tales that abound; and delivers them both. It is an enjoyable read, and my only complaints are that:
a. I wish that the writing itself were a little more engaging
b. I wish there was more to read about Slade! and for this, I cannot blame Rottenberg a'tall, because he really does squeeze the sponge dry.
This is an enjoyable book on a distinctly American historical figure.
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