Historic Photos of Heroes of the Old West (review)

Historic Photos of the Heroes of the Old West is Mike Cox's latest book in his second career as a western historian. A former newspaper reporter and spokesman for state agencies, he now writes books and articles on western subjects. This book can be considered a companion volume to his Historic Photos of Texas Oil and Historic Photos of Texas Lawmen.

The book is a beautiful publication of nearly two hundred images and text, all of it put together by the author. The chapter titles include specific categories—then a listing of same—but also the maddeningly unspecific "They Spanned a Continent," which covers everyone who went west.

All of that said, there are problems with this book. On a superficial level, they start with pagination, credits, index, and bibliography. The pagination in the table of contents does not match the pagination in the text. The credits are not placed with the various images but are all lumped together at the end of the book, which is an inconvenience when you are reading along. And there is no index or bibliography. The former means you cannot quickly find a particular person or scene; the latter means we have no idea what historical research is behind the book. All of these issues show inattention to detail and to making the book useful to the serious reader.

On a deeper, historical level, there are also problems. The pictures are nothing new; most of them are recognizable from other publications—more than a few in mass-marketed textbooks. I would have appreciated some new or at least rare images, but that would have required mining non-traditional sources, and all of these except for a few from the author's personal collection come from the usual sources like the Library of Congress and the University of Oklahoma.

So what about the descriptions that accompany the pictures? Unfortunately, for the most part they add nothing to our historical knowledge, nor do they attempt to analyze the images. This is a glaring problem in several cases. On pages 95 and 100 we see pictures of George Armstrong Custer and his nearly-as-famous wife Libbie. Yet the author does not identify Libbie on either page. On page 117, we see an image of a public hanging in Prescott, Arizona, in 1877. The description says the condemned is "listening to a final prayer before the trap is sprung." That cannot be because the noose has not even been placed around his neck nor the hood fitted over his head. True, the condemned probably is not going anywhere, but the description is still misleading. Most of the pictures are not dated either, so we have no idea, for instance, when the shot of outlaw Bill Doolin's bullet-riddled corpse (158) was taken.

The background material at the beginning of every section is written in broad, generic strokes. There are no footnotes and therefore no idea where particular details and interpretations came from. For instance, on page 181 the author says Buffalo Bill was probably "the most photographed figure in the history of the Old West." I am pretty sure George Custer wins that contest by a length, but I am willing to argue the point if the author would provide some numbers or documentation instead of just tossing off the statement in passing.

Nowhere does the author define what era he means by "the Old West" although his choice of images goes from the early nineteenth century through an undated photograph of Owen Wister. More troubling, for a book that purports to be "Photos of the Heroes of the Old West," why are there pictures of newspaper clippings and buildings? The images from the first half of the nineteenth century are not even photographs but engravings and woodcuts.

This is a book of nice images with a pleasant text, worth a couple of hours of your time leafing through it if you...