Description

In the late nineteenth century, Tom Ketchum and his brother Sam formed the Ketchum Gang-with Will Carver and Dave Atkins-and became successful train robbers. Eventually Tom Ketchum was caught and sentenced to death for attempting to hold up a railway train. He became the first individual-and the last-ever to be executed for a crime of this sort. He was hanged in 1901, his head torn away by the rope as he fell from the gallows. Jeffrey Burton has been researching the story of the Ketchum Gang for more than forty years. He sorts fact from fiction to provide the definitive truth about Ketchum and numerous other outlaws, including Ben Kilpatrick and Butch Cassidy.

"This is the best work ever done on the New Mexico outlaws at the turn of the twentieth century."-Robert K. DeArment, author of Bat Masterson

"A monster read on everything you ever wanted to know about the Ketchums. Like all good history books, it makes me want to go visit all the sites."-Bob Boze Bell, True West

"The book is a first-rate study of the numerous outlaws associated with the Ketchum and Wild Bunch gangs."-Wild West History Association Journal

"Exceptional history. . . . [M]ay well be the definitive account of one of the West's most feared gangs."-New Mexico Magazine