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Title: Last of the Old-Time Outlaws: The George West Musgrave Story by Karen Holliday Tanner, Jr. Tanner John D., John D. Tanner ISBN: 0-8061-3424-0 Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $45.00

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Average Customer Rating: 3.67 (3 reviews)

Rating: 1
Summary: Disappointing
Comment: I read the other reviews and, after buying this book, was deeply disappointed. It reads more like a history book and is difficult to follow. It is jumpy and not smooth in the books flow. Without knowing the area, the canyons and ridges all run together but the book is written as if everyone reading it has intimate knowledge of the area. It was also hard to keep up with all the people because, once again, the book jumps around so much.

Nothing about this book flowed at all and the stories were disjointed. All in all, I was extremely disappointed with this book and would not recommend it to anyone looking for an easy reading, smooth flowing narrative of this outlaw.

Rating: 5
Summary: An absorbing biography
Comment: The collaboration of biographer Karen Holliday Tanner and western history expert John D. Tanner, Jr. (Professor of History, Palomar College, San Marcos, California), Last Of The Old-Time Outlaws: The George West Musgrave Story is the informed and informative account of the notorious bandit, robber, and killer of the American Southwest, George West Musgrave (1877-1947), who was a charter member of the High Five/Black Jack gang, which in turn was responsible for Arizona's first bank hold-up as well as many other robberies. Only the ravages of failing health brought an end to Musgrave's crimes. Last Of The Old-Time Outlaws is enthusiastically recommended as being an absorbing biography of one of a rare oxymoron -- a successful career criminal.

Rating: 5
Summary: The Real McCoy
Comment: Here was an old time outlaw that didn't cotton to spending time in jail, fumbling robberies, or getting perforated by Banana Republic Keystone Cops. He was in the mold of O. Henry's bad guys in Cabbages and Kings. Further, he died a happy, affluent rascal, just as he lived - and get this - in 1947. Plenty living still remember this outlaw and to John Tanner who wrote the book with his wife, Karen (Doc Holliday, A Family Portrait: she is Doc's closest living blood relative) George Musgrave was more of an in-law than an outlaw. John is related to him so many ways it's hard to keep them straight, but John can, and does.

Karen tells a great story about her husband when they were at a Texas shindig, among Musgrave's relatives, (i.e. like John that's almost everyone is south Texas) where some disgruntled local accosted her and said: "All of these people think they're related to each other." Karen said without hesitation and with not the foggiest idea who this fellow was: "I'll bet you a bunch my husband is related to you and can prove it." She brought John over and they did prove it. The fellow simply scratched his head.

John is not only related to all the participants on the Taylor side of the bloody Sutton/Taylor feud (but I'd bet he's related to some on the other side). Moreover he's related to half the people down here in my neck of the woods, and most of them were related to George Musgrave. Take Howard Lindsay who ran the Boot Hill Museum in Tombstone for years. He's a second something or other to both George and John. So, if you think John doesn't know what he's writing about here, blame it on the relatives who were there and told him - and showed him the pictures, by gum, and a lot of them are in this book, and talk about damned interesting faces.

George was no joke, however. He rode up to an ex-Texas Ranger who was a foreman on the famed Diamond A Ranch out here in my neck of the woods, recognized him as the SOB who had killed one of his relatives, and burned him down without hesitation. George must have been all of nineteen at the time. His horse must have been a lot younger than that because when he split the breeze no one caught him.

Ever hear of the High Five Gang? George was a stalwart. This was an outfit that didn't shoot itself in the foot blowing up a RR car and leaving the pieces all over the landscape. They got the loot. And they evaded such legendary lawmen as George Scarborough, Jeff Milton, John Slaughter, Billy Breakenride (who finally became a lawman after leaving Tombstone and his Sweetie, Curly Bill and hero John Ringo, "the gunfighter who never was") and others.

Emil Franzi, fabled Tucson radio personality (when the mood strikes him to air his show) phoned here the other day and had just finished the book and was raving: "Forget those other phonies, like Butch and Sundance! This SOB is the real McCoy!" Besides that he could read, brushed his teeth, washed his feet regularly and knew how to order in French from a menu. Honest Injun.

My advice it the read this mother and find out for yourself. If Hollywood doesn't discover that it's been barking up the wrong trees for years and zero in on this badman, I miss my guess. Probably years too late and after being dragged to the party, but I predict this one will burn down the barn when they finally film it.

And it's just plain fun reading. It's full of peripheral characters like John's uncle who periodically phones him - usually on a dead Sunday - and says John, "Let's go shoot us a Sutton." This is, as I recall, the same uncle who wires buzzard wings on dead armadillos and puts them in the road for some dumb tourist to stop and gawk at, whereupon he comes out with a shotgun and cusses them out for "killin' the last danged winged armadillo in Texas."

Come to think about it the authors here, and the characters they know that are still around kicking, are as interesting as their protagonist.