From the days when Leif Eriksen's half sister Freydis seized an ax and personally hacked to pieces five of her fellow colonists, to today when an American is thirty-five times more likely to be murdered with a hand gun than is a Briton, Dane, German, or Swede, violence has been very much a part of American life. This has been especially true under frontier conditions-at least in our national imagination. W. Eugene Hollon here presents the first general study of this important and curiously compelling topic. He points out that there was more violence in American cities during the nineteenth century than on the Western frontier; yet the Western outlaw's deeds, "real and imaginary, have served as a culturally valid metaphor of how we have vied ourselves. Engrossingly written and illustrated, this book deals with the misdeeds of claim jumpers and cattle rustlers, hired gunslingers and homicidal maniacs, racial bigots of various colors, and also with the violence of the so-called "gentlemen of property and standing"-ranchers, bankers, railroad owners, and others who sometimes took the law into their own hands.