Roy Bean is one of the immortals of the Old West, a rough-and-ready old timer once celebrated from San Antonio to Shanghai. He came to Texas in 1882 and had his town named after a romantic crush (a British socialite he never met). When he hung up his shingle as a justice of the peace and notary public, he offered ice-cold beer. Bean upheld the peace to his own satisfaction and personal gain and ran his courtroom with the spirit, not the letter, of the law. Here, the endless stories are told: how he fined a corpse for carrying a concealed weapon, why he married couples and quickly divorced them, the bamboozling, the swaggering, and his exhibiting live animals at his bar. The “Law West of the Pecos,” with a great appetite for publicity and a knack for achieving it, was something more than an amusing old scoundrel—for Roy Bean had in him the stuff of a folk hero of the sort which the Old West could hardly again produce.

Originally published in 1943 by the Macmillan Company in El Paso.