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+ PREF ACE ∂ My first attempt at a narrative study of the life and criminal career of Thomas Edward Ketchum was published unobtrusively in Santa Fe at the end of 1970. It was not a finished piece of historical writing; I was all too well aware of important source materials that existed only in the original and were inaccessible to someone who, at that time, had visited the United States only once and whose direct experience of Texas was limited to a nocturnal journey across the Panhandle. Still, thanks to the intercession of friends and fortune, I had been able to draw together enough hitherto hidden data to justify publication. With the march of time and technology, material that had been unobtainable in the 1960s became available during the following decades. Besides that, my own travels after 1970 put me on first-hand terms with research materials whose custodians could not always answer postal queries. Above all, new friends emerged with information I might never have found unaided even if I had known of its existence and whereabouts; without them, my hopes of repairing the deficiencies of the earlier book could not have been fulfilled. Those who have read or referred to Dynamite and Six-shooter will recognize the titles of seventeen of the twenty-three chapters that comprise the present narrative. Passages of direct quotations in the earlier book also reappear, since, of course, they are just as relevant to the present volume as to its predecessor. Naturally, too, the construction of the new book has been guided by the same general lines as the older one. The most noticeable difference between the two works is that this one is more than double the length of its forebear. The text that was judged to be adequate in 1970 has nearly all gone, progressively superseded by a continuous and eventually comprehensive fusion of new writing and rewriting. Those considerations are more than enough to compel the relinquishment of the cover title upon which the idea of a biography of Tom Ketchum was founded almost forty years ago. I owe much in both moral and material assistance to the generosity, enthusiasm, industry, and expertise of Karen Holliday Tanner and John D. Tanner, of Fallbrook, California. As correspondents, co-researchers, and hosts, over a period of nine years ix x Preface to date, they first persuaded me to undertake the labor of revision and then made the task vastly lighter and pleasanter. The endnotes will, in some part, attest to the value and extent of their contribution. In the early 1970s, I received some prime information on the Ketchum family background from Sam Ketchum’s great-grandson, Berry Spradley, then of Houston and Anton, Texas, and now of Spring, Texas. When, after an interval of thirty years, contact was re-established, he kindly provided me with an extensive summary of more than three decades of continuing research into the personal and genealogical history of the Ketchum family, along with many of the illustrations that enrich this narrative. Whether or not it is true that, wherever life takes us, most of us are never far from our origins, I believe this to be the most important and impressive single source of information on the Ketchum brothers and their kin. Tom and Sam Ketchum were rarely mentioned in a long, though intermittent correspondence with Dan Buck, of Washington, D.C., but his lodestar research, with Anne Meadows, on those contemporaries of the Ketchums, Robert Leroy Parker and Harry Longabaugh, offered a copious draught of inspiration by example. Others who helped me and whom it is now my pleasure to thank are Bob Alexander, Maypearl, Texas; Marinell Ash, from New Mexico but then (1983–4) living in Edinburgh, Scotland; Barbara Barton, Knickerbocker, Texas; Michael Bell, Rubery, Birmingham, England; Eric Bittner, Archivist, and predecessor, N.A.R.A., Denver, Colorado; John Boessenecker, San Francisco, California; Bill Doty, Archivist, N.A.R.A., Laguna Niguel, Californai; Donna B. Ernst, Ocean City, Connecticut and Lederach, Pennsylvania; Jo-Ann E. Palmer, Secretary, Sutton County Historical Society, Sonora, Texas; Chuck Parsons, Luling, Texas; Lawrence R. Reno, Denver, Colorado; Carol Roark, Manager, Texas/Dallas History, Public Library, Dallas, Texas, whose thoughtfulness enabled me to read a large section of a crucially important broadsheet source; David Smurthwaite, National Army Museum, Chelsea, London, England; Bob and Jan Wybrow, of Bickley, Kent, England; past and present staff members of the Arizona Historical Society, Tucson, and the Texas State Archives, Austin, and the far-sighted folk...

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