Description
The Press of the Pioneers, Published 1933. Hardcover, xii, 229 pp.; 25 cm; First Edition (limited issue of 200 copies, this copy no. 123); frontispiece portrait of Hickok and eleven black-and-white plates.
Rare, out-of-print & unusual books · Since 1997
112
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Condition & notes
In Very Good condition, no dust jacket. Brick red cloth boards with gilt portrait of Hickok at the top of the front cover and gilt lettering on front cover and spine. Spine sunned, with gilt dimmed but still legible. Mild shelf wear; corners lightly rubbed. Binding tight. Limitation plate intact on the inside front cover. A contemporary presentation inscription in ink on the half-title page, dated November 13, 1933, reading "To My Dear Husband for his 63rd birthday." Pages lightly toned with age but otherwise unmarked. Deckle (uncut) edges. Magenta endpapers. Connelley's biography of James Butler Hickok (1837-1876), the Union scout, plainsman, and frontier marshal whose legend had multiplied through Nichols' 1867 Harper's Magazine article and Buel's later embellishments. Connelley, Secretary of the Kansas State Historical Society, spent more than four decades gathering testimony from contemporaries and locating original sources; he died in 1930 before completing the manuscript, which was finished by his daughter Edith Connelley Clift with an introduction by Charles Moreau Harger of Abilene. The book traces Hickok's family origins, his Civil War service as a Union scout in Missouri and at Pea Ridge, his postwar marshalships at Hays and Abilene, his time on the touring stage, and his death at the hands of Jack McCall in Deadwood. Cited in Adams One-Fifty (33), Howes (C-690), Six-Guns (480), and Graff (852). Contents: Wild Bill Himself; Wild Bill's Marksmanship; The Hickok Family, Wild Bill Leaves Home; Early Life in the West; Adventures on the Santa Fe Trail; Wild Bill Kills McCanles; How Wild Bill Got His Name; Preliminary Services in Missouri for the Union; Wild Bill's First Scouting Expedition; The Battle of Pea Ridge, or Elkhorn Tavern; War-time Adventures of Wild Bill; Girls in a Death Grapple; The Price Raid of 1864; The Killing of Dave Tutt; Wild Bill Returns to Kansas; Wild Bill in Hancock's Indian War; Custer and Wild Bill; Wild Bill in 1868; Wild Bill in 1869, to July; Wild Bill in 1869, Marshal at Hays; Wild Bill in Topeka, Winter 1869-70; Cowboys and Cowboy Life; Wild Bill, Marshal of Abilene; Wild Bill's Show Life; Wild Bill at Ellsworth, Dodge City, Wichita (Miscellaneous); Calamity Jane; Wild Bill's Death; Conviction and Execution of Jack McCall; Notes; Index of Names and Places.