[Why This Book Is Here]
[1. Boyhood Days]
[2. The Dark and Bloody Ground]
[3. Driven from Home]
[4. The Trap That Failed]
[5. Vengeance Indeed]
[6. In the Enemy's Lines]
[7. Lone Jack]
[8. A Foul Crime]
[9. How Elkins Escaped]
[10. A Price on My Head]
[11. Betrayed]
[12. Quantrell on War]
[13. The Palmyra Butchery]
[14. Lawrence]
[15. Chasing Cotton Thieves]
[16. A Clash with Apaches]
[17. The Edicts of Outlawry]
[18. Not All Black]
[19. A Duel and an Auction]
[20. Laurels Unsought]
[21. The Truth about John Younger]
[22. Amnesty Bill Fails]
[23. Belle Starr]
[24. “Captain Dykes”]
[25. Eluding the Police]
[26. Ben Butler's Money]
[27. Horace Greeley Perry]
[28. The Northfield Raid]
[29. A Chase to the Death]
[30. To Prison for Life]
[31. Some Private History]
[32. Lost—Twenty-five Years]
[33. The Star of Hope]
[34. On Parole]
[35. Jim Gives It Up]
[36. Free Again]
[37. The Wild West]
[38. What My Life Has Taught Me]
[An Afterward]

Illustrations

[Cole Younger]
[Nannie Harris and Charity Kerr]
[John Jarrette]
[William Clarke Quantrell]
[William Gregg]
[Jim Younger]
[Jesse James (top) and Frank James (bottom)]
[John Younger]
[Bob Younger]
[Illustration: Wild West Show advertisement]

Why This Book Is Here

Many may wonder why an old “guerrilla” should feel called upon at this late day to rehearse the story of his life. On the eve of sixty, I come out into the world to find a hundred or more of books, of greater or less pretensions, purporting to be a history of “The Lives of the Younger Brothers,” but which are all nothing more nor less than a lot of sensational recitals, with which the Younger brothers never had the least association. One publishing house alone is selling sixty varieties of these books, and I venture to say that in the whole lot there could not be found six pages of truth. The stage, too, has its lurid dramas in which we are painted in devilish blackness.

It is therefore my purpose to give an authentic and absolutely correct history of the lives of the “Younger Brothers,” in order that I may, if possible, counteract in some measure at least, the harm that has been done my brothers and myself, by the blood and thunder accounts of misdeeds, with which relentless sensationalists have charged us, but which have not even the suggestion of truth about them, though doubtless they have had everything to do with coloring public opinion.