Samuel K. Dolan

Turn-of-the-century San Francisco detective Arthur T. McQuaide was a force to be reckoned with. A child of Irish immigrants, McQuaide inherited a city hell-bent on its own destruction. His experiences with the city's police force range from the tragic earthquake of 1906 to the brutal Chinatown Tong Wars. Through contemporary newspapers and other period documents the life of Arthur McQuaide, a true lawman at the dawn of a new era, is revealed at long last.

This book tells the little-known story of the origins of the US Border Patrol, starting during the final days of the “Wild West” on the US-Mexico border and tracing the origins of the modern federal agency as it came into its own during the violence of the Prohibition Era in the 1920s. Given today’s headlines, the Border Patrol is currently one of the most visible, and arguably controversial, agencies of the federal government. Few people, however, know the true story of how the Border Patrol came into existence. Spanning a little more than 50 years, from the Chinese Exclusion Act to the beginnings of the drug war on the border at the height of Prohibition, “The Line Riders” introduces the officers that guarded the international boundary when the West was still wild.

Spanning a thirty-year period, from the late 1800s until the 1920s, “Welcome to 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.

Even after WWI had ended, the region of Arizona, New Mexico, and West Texas stubbornly refused to be tamed. It was still a place where frontier gunfights still broke out at an alarming rate. Utilizing official records, newspaper accounts, and oral histories, Cowboys and Gangsters tells the story of the untamed “Wild West” of the Prohibition-era of the 1920s and early 1930s and introduces a rogues’ gallery of sixgun-packing western gunfighters and lawmen. Told through the lens of the accounts of a handful of Texas Rangers and Federal Agents, this book covers a unique and action-packed era in American history. It’s a story that connects the horse and saddle days of the Old West, with the high-octane decade of the Roaring Twenties.