As with much of Ward’s source material, Siringo’s life can feel retrospectively absurd, too authentic to be real.

As much a chronicle of the Old West as it is the study of a colorful, and ubiquitous, frontiersman.

Ward’s book is dense with research and description. Sometimes too dense. Colorful stories — of horse thieving, dangerous wagon journeys, double-crossing and shootouts — occasionally sag under the weight of benign particulars..

The larger-than-life, Texas-born cowboy Charlie Siringo lived a life normally reserved for fiction, one every bit as full of adventure, intrigue, and derring-do as any western movie.

A vibrant portrait.

Ward doesn't quite prove that Siringo helped create the foundations of the literature of the American West, he shows that this original cowboy certainly lived out the most fertile period of that time and place. A well-rendered cowboy tale that fleshes out a larger history of the Old West..