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The Last Ride: Outlaw Laura Bullion and the Wild Bunch
“Chris Enss’s newest nonfiction work, The Last Ride, is Old West crime biography at its finest. The well-written, smoothly paced book brings fresh light and new life to the little-known story of Laura Bullion, now considered “America’s first female train robber.”
Enss’s wide-ranging research not only uncovered intriguing new details about Laura Bullion and the outlaw she loved, “Tall Texan” Ben Kilpatrick. It also explains how Laura was able, after her 1905 release from prison, to outwit the sensationalist media and deliberately escape into obscurity.
Born in tiny Mertzon, Texas, in 1876, Laura grew up nearby in Knickerbocker, in an area that soon became known as a haven for criminals. (A huge blizzard in 1887 killed countless cattle and left many cowboys and ranch hands desperate for work; some turned to crime.) Laura’s parents had died while she was still young, and the unsupervised wild-child eventually became a “green-eyed, five-foot-four woman with prominent cheekbones and a reputation for being able to ride like a jockey and shoot like Annie Oakley,” Enss writes.
By age 16, Laura already had met up, through shady friends, with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Then she joined the notorious bandits known as the Wild Bunch, “a criminal syndicate that terrorized railroads and banks across the West at the turn of the twentieth century.” Enss quotes Laura recalling: “Horses and cowboys was all I ever knew.”
During their final train robbery in July 1901, the Wild Bunch took Laura along for her “ability to charm, distract, and deceive” people they encountered along the way, and she was dressed as a cowboy, Enss notes. The gang, including Kilpatrick, successfully robbed the train in Montana’s Missouri Breaks badlands, then split up and escaped when pursuing law enforcement grew close.
Enss describes how Kilpatrick and Laura fled to Texas and kept moving through other states, too, including Arizona and Arkansas, posing as man and wife. They spent lavishly, openly enjoying their new wealth, before Pinkerton detectives tracked them down and apprehended them in St. Louis in November 1901.
Kilpatrick received a life sentence. And, when Laura was sent to prison for seven years, Enss writes chillingly: “The iron door to the women’s ward clanged shut, sending a metallic shiver through the stone corridor of the Missouri State Penitentiary.”
The heart of The Last Ride is its focus on the hopeful love letters Laura and Kilpatrick wrote to each other while incarcerated and continued penning after Laura’s release. She had served only half of her original sentence. Now, intense media scrutiny and social shaming quickly and relentlessly followed the still-young woman everywhere she went.
Nonetheless, she kept trying to get fresh starts. And she continued seeking ways to have Kilpatrick’s sentence shortened so they could live together. She even changed her name several times and moved from town to town and state to state—until she finally found peaceful obscurity working as a seamstress in a big city, Memphis.
As Enss makes clear, “Laura Bullion left behind no explanation for the choices she made, only a life lived in fragments and shadows.” The author has described her latest book as “an attempt to gather those fragments” and “give shape to a woman long obscured by the men beside her….”
However, The Last Ride “seeks neither to excuse her crimes nor to romanticize them, but to understand how and why a woman once hunted by the law managed to outlive her legend and what it cost her to do so,” Enss emphasizes.
America’s first female train robber is now no longer lost among the still-frequent barrages of images, legends, articles, and books focused only on male outlaws of the Old West. Enss, who has written more than fifty books about unusual and pioneering women in the Old West, clearly portrays not only who Laura Bullion was and what she did. She reveals how Laura managed to create an uncommon new life in her final decades, while surviving longer than all others in the Wild Bunch.”
—Lone Star Literary Life
Enter now to win a copy of The Last Ride.
Available everywhere books are sold on August 15.
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