MUST SEE, MUST READ
TULAROSA: LAST OF THE FRONTIER WEST
(1960, C.L. Sonnichsen): Here’s the powerful opening sentence that promises gritty frontier tales: “The Tularosa country is a parched desert where everything, from cactus to cowman, carries a weapon of some sort, and the only creatures who sleep with both eyes closed are dead.” Charles Leland Sonnichsen (1901–91) delivers an easy-to-read, ripsnorting history of New Mexico’s Tularosa Valley. Among the memorable characters who show up on these pages are Pat Garrett, Albert Jennings Fountain, Albert Fall, Oliver Lee and Bill McNew. The real story of Tularosa, Sonnichsen notes, is the story of Texas cattlemen, “proud riders who kept the Old West alive in that lonely land until yesterday.”
Pat Garrett: The Story of a Western Lawman (1973, Leon C. Metz): While majoring in history at the University of New Mexico in the early 1970s, I took an interest in the unofficial state outlaw, Billy the Kid, but ended up reading instead this biography of the man who killed the Kid. Am I ever glad I did. The ups and downs of Garrett’s life on the frontier held my interest more than any history lecture class and got me hooked on the real West, not just the TV Westerns I watched while growing up in the East. Later, I had the good fortune of getting to know El Paso author Metz (1930–2020), a great guy who no doubt would have gotten along well with both Pat and Billy. I went on to read his books about gunfighters John Wesley Hardin, John Selman and Dallas Stoudenmire, and finally I got around to Garrett’s own (1882) and Frederick Nolan’s excellent (1998).
