{"title":"Ac Greene","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"900-miles-on-the-butterfield-trail-book-ac-greene-9781574412130","title":"900 Miles on the Butterfield Trail","description":"Remember, boys, nothing on God's earth must stop the United States mail! said John Butterfield to his drivers. Short as the life of the Southern Overland Mail turned out to be (1858 to 1861), the saga of the Butterfield Trail remains a high point in the westward movement. A. C. Greene offers a history and guide to retrace that historic and romantic Trail, which stretches 2800 miles from the Mississippi River to the Pacific coast.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50202492567825,"sku":"CIN1574412132G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50822272352529,"sku":"GOR014086421","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51037552181521,"sku":"NIN9781574412130","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52428743606545,"sku":"NLS9781574412130","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1574412132.jpg?v=1763220820"},{"product_id":"chance-encounters-book-ac-greene-9780970998798","title":"Chance Encounters","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50256720691473,"sku":"CIN0970998791VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53217193328913,"sku":"CIN0970998791G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0970998791.jpg?v=1751077723"},{"product_id":"johnson-sims-feud-book-bill-o-neal-9781574412901","title":"The Johnson-Sims Feud","description":"In the early 1900s, two families in Scurry and Kent counties in West Texas united in a marriage of fourteen-year-old Gladys Johnson to twenty-one-year-old Ed Sims. Billy Johnson, the father, set up Gladys and Ed on a ranch, and the young couple had two daughters. But Gladys was headstrong and willful, and Ed drank too much, and both sought affection outside their marriage. A nasty divorce ensued, and Gladys moved with her girls to her father’s luxurious ranch house, where she soon fell in love with famed Texas Ranger Frank Hamer. When Ed tried to take his daughters for a prearranged Christmas visit in 1916, Gladys and her brother Sid shot him dead on the Snyder square teeming with shoppers.      One of the best lawyers in West Texas, Judge Cullen Higgins (son of the old feudist Pink Higgins) managed to win acquittal for both Gladys and Sid. In the tradition of Texas feudists since the 1840s, the Sims family sought revenge. Sims’ son-in-law, Gee McMeans, led an attack in Sweetwater and shot Billy Johnson’s bodyguard, Frank Hamer, twice, while Gladys—by now Mrs. Hamer—fired at another assassin. Hamer shot back, killed McMeans, and was no-billed on the spot by a grand jury watching the shootout through a window. An attempt against Billy Johnson failed, but a three-man team shotgunned the widely respected Cullen Higgins. Texas Rangers and other lawmen caught one of the assassins, extracted a confession, and then prompted his “suicide” in a Sweetwater jail cell.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50299228619025,"sku":"CIN1574412906VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50382968455441,"sku":"CIN1574412906G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1574412906.jpg?v=1750762562"},{"product_id":"santa-claus-bank-robbery-book-ac-greene-9781574410716","title":"The Santa Claus Bank Robbery","description":"\u003cdiv\u003eMaster storyteller A. C. Greene re-creates one of America's most bizarre holdups--one that began as a lark. On Christmas Eve 1927, four men set off to rob the First National Bank of Cisco, Texas. Soon the lark turned into a tragedy--and at times a comedy--of errors. The robbers did not realize the car they had stolen for their getaway was running on empty. The leader did not anticipate the attention his disguise would draw, even though it was a bright red Santa Claus suit. And they could not have known that all of Cisco would have guns at hand because the Bankers Association had offered a reward of $5,000 for any dead bank robber, no questions asked. The Santa Claus bank robbery set off a chain of events that would lead to violence and the death of six men and launch the largest manhunt Texas had ever seen.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e A. C. Greene's factual account of the unusual crime reads like a novel--fast paced, full of unexpected turns, and rich with the flavor of life in Texas at the beginning of the end of the Old West. This new edition contains an Afterword with photographs, some of them never before published, and followup information on the lives of the participants, including the surviving robber, witnesses, and kidnap victims.\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50390980264209,"sku":"CIN1574410717G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1574410717.jpg?v=1763485158"},{"product_id":"personal-country-book-ac-greene-9781574410532","title":"A Personal Country","description":"\u003cdiv\u003eThis book brings alive what one man feels about his childhood home. The place is West Texas, seen across a long vista in which today's events and people merge with the author's boyhood and young manhood.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e It is a harsh, remote country, where the weather is always very close and the horizon far away. The Brazos country of long-ago Fourth of July fishing expeditions; the grass-grown remains of a way station of the Butterfield Stage Line; the streets of Abilene; the sparse grazing lands under infinite skies--all are made resonant by a native son's affection and understanding. It is a way of life--resilient and persnickety--that is almost gone.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Above all, it is people: the author's grandmother, who had a mortal fear of bridges and whose premonitions of unnamed calamities (that as often as not happened), both alarmed and pleased the young boy; Uncle Aubrey, \"who married late\"; the blacksmith they awakened in the dead of night; the familiar neighbors; the rare and deliciously mysterious strangers.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e With humor and strong, unsentimental feeling, A. C. Greene conserves for us the priceless eccentricities of place and person that are being flattened out--almost literally bulldozed away--by the impatient, insatiable onrush of the twentieth century. His West Texas is a very personal country, but what he seeks to share will be familiar to all who take pleasure in the memories that tie them to their own special region of America.\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50468366123281,"sku":"CIN1574410539G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51038456054033,"sku":"NIN9781574410532","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51804560982289,"sku":"CIN1574410539VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52331744821521,"sku":"NLS9781574410532","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1574410539.jpg?v=1763221438"},{"product_id":"deadliest-outlaws-book-jeffrey-burton-9781574414745","title":"The Deadliest Outlaws","description":"After Tom Ketchum had been sentenced to death for attempting to hold up a railway train, his attorneys argued that the penalty was “cruel and unusual” for the offence charged. The appeal failed and he became the first individual—and the last—ever to be executed for a crime of this sort. He was hanged in 1901; in a macabre ending to his life of crime, his head was torn away by the rope as he fell from the gallows.   Tom Ketchum was born in 1863 on a farm near the fringe of the Texas frontier. At the age of nine, he found himself an orphan and was raised by his older brothers. In his mid-twenties he left home for the life of an itinerant trail driver and ranch hand. He returned to Texas, murdered a man, and fled. Soon afterwards, he and his brother Sam killed two men in New Mexico. A year later, he and two other former cowboys robbed a train in Texas. The career of the Ketchum Gang was under way.    In their day, these men were the most daring of their kind, and the most feared. They were accused of crimes that were not theirs, but their proven record is long and lurid. Their downfall was brought about by what one editor called “the magic of the telephone and telegraph,” by quarrels between themselves, and by their reckless defiance of ever-mounting odds.    Jeffrey Burton has been researching the story of the Ketchum Gang and related outlaws for more than forty years. He has mined unpublished sources, family records, personal reminiscences, trial transcripts and other court papers, official correspondence and reports, census returns, and contemporary newspapers to sort fact from fiction and provide the definitive truth about Ketchum and numerous other outlaws, including Will Carver, Ben Kilpatrick, and Butch Cassidy.    The Deadliest Outlaws initially was published in a limited run of 100 paperback copies in England. This second edition in hardcover contains additional material and photographs not found in the earlier printing. It will prove to be the final word on the Ketchum and Wild Bunch gangs.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51037585178897,"sku":"NIN9781574414745","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51522766733585,"sku":"CIN1574414747G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52455281230097,"sku":"NLS9781574414745","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1574414747.jpg?v=1763222269"},{"product_id":"deadliest-outlaws-book-jeffrey-burton-9781574412703","title":"The Deadliest Outlaws","description":"In the late nineteenth century Tom Ketchum and his brother Sam formed the Ketchum Gang with other outlaws and became successful train robbers. This book presents the definitive truth about Ketchum and numerous other outlaws, including Will Carver and Butch Cassidy.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52091683275025,"sku":"CIN1574412701G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781574412703.jpg?v=1756934780"},{"product_id":"sketches-from-five-states-of-texas-book-ac-greene-9780890968536","title":"Sketches from Five States of Texas","description":"\u003cdiv\u003eWhen veteran columnist A. C. Greene turns his eyes on Texas, he sees a variety of experiences and a scope of history that fascinate the rest of us. Under its annexation terms, Texas is allowed to divide itself into as many as six states. While that is not ever likely to happen, Greene masterfully shows that several cultural states \u003ci\u003edo\u003c\/i\u003e exist within the one political entity of Texas--and have throughout the state's history.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Greene has a wide-ranging curiosity about the \"facts\" of Texas history: what lies behind them, what quirks of human nature they reveal, how the people who lived them might have experienced them, roads not taken, and why things have come to be as they are. His historical writing has helped make Texas' past accessible and even interesting to the public for over forty years.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Spotlighting individuals, places, and events that make for distinctiveness, \u003ci\u003eSketches from the Five States of Texas\u003c\/i\u003e features oddities and little-known facts that present a kind of \"history-within-history.\" Several sketches look at inventions or innovations, such as plows and Other pieces focus on historic moments: the first long distance telephone service; the last messenger from the Alamo. Transportation is a theme that runs through this book: trains, planes (including a box-kite contraption), early automobiles and roads, and steamboats, ice boats, and war boats. Place names get attention, too: peculiar names, unexpected sources, and long-lost places. Naturally, the wars of Texas are also covered: the Revolution, the Indian wars, the Civil War, and the Texas Navies.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e The pieces in this collection originated, for the most part, in Greene's popular \u003ci\u003eDallas Morning News\u003c\/i\u003e columns; several sketches and all the regional introductions are completely new. Aficionados of Texas history will already know some of what they read here, but they will not know all of it. Greene's nuggets of history will inform and entertain a wide reading public. They represent A. C. Greene at his best and most engaging--and the states of Texas at their best, too.\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52448066011409,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52448066666769,"sku":"CIN0890968535VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780890968536.jpg?v=1763480383"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/collections\/author-books-by-ac-greene.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}