Dead Shot
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Walter Ferguson’s life was a microcosm of America from the Civil War—what Walt calls “The War of Southern Rebellion”—through Prohibition.
Born in a small Western Pennsylvania coal mining town in 1844, Walt showed an innate ability to shoot accurately with whatever he had in his hand. He joined the 11th Pennsylvania Volunteers (The Bloody Eleventh) in 1862 and moved west after the war.
While doing what he could to get by, Walt met Wild Bill Hickok, who planted the idea of becoming a lawman in the younger man’s head, where it was harvested by Deputy United States Marshal Robert Bartholomew “Bo” Cobb. Walt spent most of the rest of the 19th Century as a federal marshal, with brief forays into local law enforcement and bounty hunting.
The end of the century saw him in his sixth decade; life on the prairie had lost much of its allure. Walt partnered with an old friend in the saloon business only to see Prohibition place him on the other side of the law.
He struck up an acquaintance in his dotage with Helena Elizabeth Judson, niece of the legendary writer Ned Buntline; it was she who took down the notes that became this book. Helena died before the volume could be completed and the files lay undisturbed for ninety years.
Read of Walt’s adventures with such Western luminaries as Wild Bill Hickok, Bat Masterson and his brothers, Wyatt Earp, Butch Cassidy, and other lesser-known figures from his early years through Prohibition. He was a man who met Raymond Chandler’s definition of the perfect private eye hero more than fifty years before it occurred to Chandler: “If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.”