“Authentic history, delightfully told” is the way Ray A. Billington, renowned historian of the Old West, described this collection. David Dary, award-winning chronicler of life on the frontier plains, is at his entertaining best in these thirty-nine episodes, sagas, and tales from Kansas’s vigorous, free-spirited past. Many of the stories appeared in Dary’s True Tales of the Old-Time Plains, but that book, out of print for several years, focused on the Great Plains in general. This new edition, revised and with additional stories and a new title, pulls together tales about people, animals and events in what is today Kansas, including the old territory of Kansas (1854-1861) that stretched from the Missouri River westward to the summit of the Rocky Mountains.
Many of the tales capture the romance, excitement, and adventure of the Old West, while others have the tempo of a quiet life surrounded by the immensity of the plains and prairies. There are well-known characters: Bill Cody, the Dalton gang, the Bloody Benders, William Clarke Quantrill, Abraham Lincoln, and Frederic Remington, who once owned a Kansas sheep ranch and later was a silent partner in a Kansas City saloon before he became a well-known artist.
And there are stories, too, about little-known characters such as Prairie Dog Dave Morrow, who made his living capturing live prairie dogs. Dary relates tales of lost treasure and sudden riches, of outlaws and “jayhawk” raiders, of massacres and heroics. A generous number of illustrations help bring the tales to life.
