Four Against the West: The True Saga of a Frontier Family That Reshaped the Nationand Created a Legend [Hardcover]

A thrilling true saga of legendary Texas figure Judge Roy Bean and his brothersand their violent adventures in Wild West America.

Roy Bean was an American saloon-keeper and Justice of the Peace in Texas, who called himself The Only Law West of the Pecos . He and his three brothers set out from Kentucky in the mid 1840s, heading into the American frontier to find their fortunes. Their lifetimes of triumphs, tragedies, laurels and scandals will play out on the battlefields of Mexico, in shady dealings in California city halls, inside eccentric saloon courtrooms of Texas, and along the blood-soaked Santa Fe Trail from Missouri to New Mexico. They will kill men, and murder will likewise stalk them.

The Beans chase their American dreams as the nation reinvents itself as a coast-to-coast powerhouse, only to be tested by the Civil War. During their saga, the brothers become soldiers, judges, husbands, guerillas, lawmen, entrepreneurs, refugees, fathers, politicians, pioneers and  in Judge Roy Beans case  one of the Old Wests best known but least understood scoundrels.

Using new information gleaned from exhaustive research, Joe Pappalardo'sFour Against the Westis an unprecedented and vivid telling of the intertwined stories of all four Bean brothers, exploring for the first time how their relentless ambitions helped create a new America.