Books: "Four Against The West" By Joe Pappalardo

 

Four Against the West: The True Saga of a Frontier Family That Reshaped the Nation - and Created a Legend

By Joe Pappalardo

St. Martin's Press; 336 pages, plus one 8-page B&W photo section; hardcover, $32.00; eBook, $14.99; available today, Tuesday, November 26th

Joe Pappalardo is the author of the critically acclaimed books Inferno: The True Story of a B-17 Gunner's Heroism and the Bloodiest Campaign in Aviation History, Sunflowers: The Secret History, Red Sky Morning, and Spaceport Earth: The Reinvention of Spaceflight. He is a freelance journalist, a contributor to Texas Monthly, a writing contributor to National Geographic Magazine, a former senior editor and current contributor to Popular Mechanics, and a former associate editor of Air & Space Smithsonian Magazine.

In the new compelling book Four Against The West, Pappalardo delivers this unique look at Roy Bean, a saloon-keeper and Justice of the Peace in Texas, who often referred to himself as "The Only Law West of the Pecos," in the full context of his family, and how their relentless ambition helped create a new America.

In the mid-1840s, the Bean brothers - Roy, James, Samuel, and Joshua - set out from Kentucky as they head into the American frontier to find their fortunes. Their lifetime is full of triumphs, tragedies, laurels, and scandals that played out on the battlefields of Mexico, in shady dealings in California city halls, inside eccentric saloon courtrooms of Texas, and on the Santa Fe Trail from Missouri to New Mexico.

Roy's story opens in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1841. The Bean family owned a large parcel of land in Mason County when he was a child. An 1820 census showed 32 people living there, including a workforce of 16 hired laborers and eight slaves. Only six of whom were Bean family members, Phantley and Anna Bean and their four children. Roy's father was a charismatic man who was a larger-than-life figure to his children. The boys each had a belief that they were men of action who were set to make the most of their circumstances, and others had to yield to their ambitions. This was the norm of American culture at the time, especially in the South. That attitude went with settlers who headed to the western frontier, and eventually formed the doctrine of Manifest Destiny.

The country is reinventing itself from coast to coast, and the Bean brothers chase their version of the American Dream. Their greatest test is on the horizon, in the Civil War, as the brothers become soldiers, judges, lawmen, businessmen, husbands and fathers, refugees and politicians, pioneers, and in Roy's case, one of the Old West's best known, but misunderstood scoundrels. 

This epic tale of the Bean brothers is the story of the American Wild West, and Pappalardo has unearthed amazing facts and anecdotes about them. His research has taken him all over the West, and his exhaustive research has led him to present this unprecedented story of the intertwined stories of the four Bean brothers. 

Pappalardo writes, in this excerpt, of what he set out to achieve with this first-of-its-kind book: "There's a simple formula for biographies  that has existed since John Boswell finished The Life of Samuel Johnson in 1791: pick an inspirational subject and spend hundreds of pages describing why that person's life was pivotal to history. It's a good formula, and this book ignores it entirely.

Instead of an individual, this tome traces four lives in parallel - those of the famous Judge Roy Bean and his brothers, James, Samuel, and Joshua. And instead of providing inspiration, each is at some point during his saga bound to rub folks the wrong way. They did so while alive; why should readers feel any differently?

However, these questionable men are also fascinating. Each was immersed in the formative history of the US Southwest, making appearances on the Santa Fe Trail, in the Mexican-American and Civil Wars, on the California coast during the Gold Rush, in wild west Texas train-construction camps, and prowling the deserts and mountains of prestate New Mexico and Arizona. That's an alluring amount of epic American frontier history to cover with a single litter of brothers.

The strange phenomenon of siblings is that their similarities make it easier to compare differences. The Bean brothers aspired for comparable things but set about achieving them in very different ways. They crossed and shared paths, often dramatically, but each eventually carved his own way through the evolving American landscape.

Each brother experienced the frantic speed of the United States during the era of 'Manifest Destiny.' This remains a loaded term in the twenty-first century as much as when it was coined in the mid-1800s. It today generates a lot of emotion: anger, nostalgia, guilt, and regional pride. Those less steeped in the era may be surprised at how a disparate mix of greed, ambition, brute force, and civic responsibility (sometimes embodied in the same person), created the contemporary United States.

The emergence of coast-to-coast American empowered a generation to believe they could influence the development of an entire continent - and they proved they could. They routinely did terrible and amazing things, to paraphrase W.E.B. Du Bois, that expanded the edge of their style of civilization.

But who were the people who rode the wave of Manifest Destiny? They weren't cardboard cutouts of heroes and villains, as easy as that would be to process. The truth is much more nuanced, and therefore interesting. Seeing Manifest Destiny from the point of view of the humans swept up in it transforms the national experience into a story of personal choices, circumstances, and consequences."