"This book - first issued in 1873 and almost unknown except to a few devotees - offers eighteen semi-fictional sketches of incidents in the pioneer Southwest. James W. Steele, a young Army officer stationed at remote outposts during the late 1860s, wrote from first-hand knowledge and with an experienced storyteller's skill. In these short-short stories with test endings you sense much of the flavor of O. Henry, who came later. Steele also had George Ruxton's alert ear for for frontier dialect and was perhaps first to record it for the Southwest. Above all, Steele was ahead of such historians as Frederick Jackson Turner and Walter Prescott Webb in realizing how the frontier changed people who lived there"--Jacket.