Prince of Pistoleers - The Wild Bill Saga, #1

Before he became a legend, James Butler Hickok was just a young man seeking his fortune in Bleeding Kansas—a territory torn apart by violence, where choosing the wrong side could cost you everything.

When James falls in love with Mary Jane Owen, a half-Shawnee woman whose fierce independence matches his own, he dares to dream of a peaceful life as a farmer. But the Border Ruffians have other plans, and his own family's prejudice adds to the resistance. Desperate and aimless, James makes a choice that will transform him forever: he embraces the gun, becoming the man the frontier needs—even if it destroys the man he wanted to be.

From his harrowing work as a Union spy to the famous shootout with Davis Tutt that made him a household name, from the brutal realities of frontier law enforcement to the fabrications of dime novelists hungry for heroes, Wild Bill Hickok's journey is one of constant reinvention. Each choice brings him closer to legend—and farther from the life he truly wanted.

Now, years later, as a reporter accompanies an aging and failing Hickok on a fateful train journey to Buffalo, the gunfighter finally tells the truth behind the mythology. It's a story of love and loss, of violence and survival, of a man who became a symbol of the Wild West while longing for the simple life he'd left behind.

Based on the real events that shaped one of America's most iconic frontier figures, this is the story of how James Butler Hickok became Wild Bill—and what it cost him to live up to a legend no man could sustain.

A tale of the American frontier where every choice has consequences, and the price of fame is measured in the lives you might have lived.