The Outlaw Trail: A History of Butch Cassidy and His Wild Bunch Book

This is an interesting book, but if you want to always know what's going on then you need a good memory for dates and names. Kelly uses lots of first- and second-hand accounts to draw a fascinating picture of the Wild West.
The book's title implies it is about Butch Cassidy, but in reality he's just one person in a society full of colorful characters. As it says in the introduction, pretty much everybody who was anybody in the Wild West gets their story told in this book. There's a lot of fascinating tales from all different people, and the story line jumps around every couple of pages to a new person. That being said, the thing connecting all the events and the names being thrown at you are the places: Brown's Hole, Hole-in-the-Wall, and Robber's Roost. Reading this book will give you a sense of what living in these three most important outlaw hideouts of the Wild West would have been like.
It did give an authentic Western portrait of the Wild West, the Wild Bunch (Cassidy's group of outlaws), and the Outlaw Trail. Charles Kelly did extensive research all over the area and even contacted many of the people connected to the Wild Bunch who are still alive today. That being said, it is somewhat confusing to read, particularly at the beginning. Kelly brings up a person, spends a couple of pages talking about them, drops them completely, and then out of the blue begins writing about them fifty pages later. I think this may be due to the limited amount of information on the outlaws, but the timeline and who-did-what was often lost. Some of the stories may stick with you, but the names, events, and places might not unless you have a fantastic memory. If you want a comprehensive, detailed, and often interesting view of the Wild West, this book is great, just be prepared to rack your memory on who this person was at least a dozen times throughout.
Charles Kelly used description sparingly but effectively throughout the book to make the scenes come to life. Using details pulled from first-hand stories and newspaper articles from the period, he paints a vivid picture of the three main outlaw haunts of the time, giving the backdrop to all of the adventurous stories.