Give a Boy a Gun: The True Story of Law and Disorder in the American West

On January 5, 1981, Idaho game wardens Bill Pogue and Conley Elms rode into the remote Owyhee Desert to check a report of poaching at Claude Dallas's trapping camp. They never rode out.

Dallas shot both men. When one fell wounded, he retrieved a .22 rifle and finished the job with a bullet to the head. Then he turned to the witness who had seen everything, a friend visiting the camp, and said: "This is Murder One for me." He buried the bodies and disappeared into the wilderness. Claude Dallas styled himself a modern-day mountain man, a man who lived by the Old West code, answered to no government, and settled disputes with a gun. For fifteen months, he eluded one of the largest manhunts in Western history. When he was finally captured, he became something more unsettling than a fugitive: a folk hero. At his trial, women known as the "Dallas Cheerleaders" gathered daily in the courtroom. His lawyers put the victim on trial, portraying Bill Pogue as a bully who had provoked Dallas into defending himself. After seven days of deliberation, the jury of ten women and two men found Claude Dallas guilty of voluntary manslaughter, not murder. He served less than half his sentence, escaped from prison, spent nearly a year on the FBI Ten Most Wanted list, and was eventually released a free man. Jack Olsen, the New York Times bestselling author known as "the dean of true crime," spent years reconstructing every dimension of this story: the killings, the manhunt, the bizarre trial, and the cultural fault line the case exposed. Law and order against frontier freedom. Justice against vigilante romanticism. Government authority against the myth of the self-sufficient Western man. "There's something wrong," Olsen said, "about creating a myth out of a murder." Give a Boy a Gun is his answer to that myth, and a searing tribute to the two men whose names the myth forgot.