The West of Wild Bill Hickok is a fantastic resource for study of Wild Bill. Joseph Rosa has put together an intensely in-depth collection of pictures and references to give context to the world that Hickok roamed through. The majority of the book is old images, with enough narrative to set up each chapter. He includes just about every photo of Wild Bill that’s ever been taken (one has to assume), as well as just about every location he ever visited, or every person he ever associated with (again, one has to assume based the bevy of pictures.
Through Rosa’s spectacular pictorial essay it is easy to get a more intimate understanding of J.M. Hickok. We get to see his family and their likenesses to each other, his different moods in different settings, and we get to see the transition of a young man hunting the world transition in to the slowly aging gunfighter who was slowly going blind.
This was Rosa’s second book on Wild Bill and if you find, after reading his first volume, They Called Him Wild Bill, still wanting to know more about the man, then this is the book to take you deeper. Of the three follow up volumes Rosa scripted, one will give you a better picture of his gunfights, one will give you a better understanding of how the myth was formed and where it came from, and this one will give you a better understanding of Will Bill himself, and just what the world around him was actually like.
The West of…was first published in 1982 and is just a hair over two-hundred pages with introduction and notes; meaning there is probably well over 400 images (if I had to guess). All-in-all, a great book, and a must for a western history collection.
Handy With A Gun...! 