Spanning a thirty-year period, from the late 1800s until the 1920s, Hell Paso is the true story of the desperate men and notorious women that made El Paso, Texas the Old West’s most dangerous town. Supported by official court documents, government records, oral histories and period newspaper accounts, this book offers a bird’s eye view of the one-time “murder metropolis” of the Southwest.

Morgan Latimer is a drifter, riding through the West trying to escape his past and especially trouble. He seeks peace. During his travels, he is forced to take shelter in a cave as a massive and ominous dirt storm plunges him into darkness. After the storm passes, Latimer overhears a scuffle breaking out between a man and a woman at a nearby creek. When the man becomes too fresh with the woman, Latimer – not being a man to sit back and watch a woman be assaulted – intervenes. Immediately, he knows he has found the trouble he was trying to avoid...

The story of Dallas Stoudenmire.

In January of 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution went into effect and the sale and manufacture of intoxicating spirits was outlawed. America had officially gone “dry.” For the next thirteen years, bootleggers and big city gangsters satisfied the country’s thirst with moonshine and contraband alcohol. On the US-Mexico border, a steady stream of black market booze flowed across the Rio Grande. Tasked with combating the liquor trade in the borderlands of the American Southwest were the “line riders” of the United States Customs Service and their colleagues in the Immigration Border Patrol. From late-night shootouts on the Rio Grande and the back alleys of El Paso, Texas, to long-range horseback pursuits across the deserts of Arizona, this book tells the little-known story of the long and deadly “liquor war” on the border during the 1920s and 1930s and highlights the evolution of the Border Patrol amidst the chaos of Prohibition. Spanning a nearly twenty-year period, from the end of World War I to repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment and beyond, The Line Riders reveals an often overlooked and violent chapter in American history and introduces the officers that guarded the international boundary when the West was still wild.

Explores the history of the Texas Rangers from their origin in 1821 to protect the settlers from the Karankawa Indians, and describes how they became one of the fiercest law enforcement groups in America.