Red Blood and Black Ink: Journalism in the Old West

After a reader shot the editor of a Kansas newspaper, the jury refused to convict the culprit. "That's just the way it is with some juries," reported another newspaper. "They think it no more harm to shoot an editor than a Jack-rabbit." Indeed, the men who reported the news on the frontier (including such luminaries as Mark Twain and Bret Harte) had to be a wild bunch. Red Blood and Black Ink provides an informative and very entertaining look at how the frontier press covered the news in the roughest towns around and helped set a cultural tone that resonates to the present day.