Desperados of New Mexico

Desperados of frontier days in the United States command a certain amount of attraction. The frontier desperado was a rugged individualist stamped and marked not by environment but by circumstance. Some of the seventeen men in this book have been pushed off the pages of their day by Billy the Kid, Clay Allison and Dave Rudabaugh. But "badmen" they all were-some with colorful lives that more often than not came to abrupt and inglorious ends. So here they are, in addition to the three mentioned above: William Coe, Dick Brewer, Jim Greathouse, Tom Pickett, J. Joshua Webb, Porter Stogden, Rattlesnake Sam, Gus Mentzer, Baca of Socorro, Dick Rogers, Joe Fowler, Vicente Bilba, Black Jack Ketchum, and even David Crockett, according to F. Stanley. This new edition in Sunstone''s Southwest Heritage Series includes a new foreword by Marc Simmons, an excerpt from F. Stanley''s biography by Mary Jo Walker, and a tribute to F. Stanley by Jack D. Rittenhouse (also from the biography). Includes bibliography. *** "An easterner by birth but a southwesterner at heart, Father Stanley Francis Louis Crocchiola had as many vocations as names," says his biographer, Mary Jo Walker. "As a young man, he entered the Catholic priesthood and for nearly half a century served his church with great zeal in various capacities, attempting to balance the callings of teacher, pastor, historian and writer." With limited money or free time, he also managed to write and publish one hundred and seventy-seven books and booklets pertaining to his adopted region under his "nom de plume," F. Stanley, The initial in that name does not stand for Father, as many have assumed, but for Francis, which Louis Crocchiola took, with the name Stanley, at the time of his ordination as a Franciscan friar in 1938. All of F. Stanley''s original titles have now reached the status of expensive collector''s items.