The branch and the scaffold ; and Billy Gashade
(Book)

"A Forge book."

The branch and the scaffold: When Judge Isaac Parker first arrived in Fort Smith, Arkansas, the town had thirty saloons and one bank. Inheriting a corrupt court and a lawless territory roughly the size of Great Britain, he immediately put the residents on notice by publicly hanging six convicted felons at one time. For the next two decades, his stern and implacable justice brought law and order to the West ... and made him plenty of enemies.

Billy Gashade: The adventures of a young, upper-class New Yorker who gets into trouble in the Civil War draft riots and flees west. On the frontier he meets gamblers, Indians, outlaws and mountain men, and has run-ins which such famous characters as General Custer and Wild Bill Hickok. Twenty years later he returns, only to take off again, this time to write cowboy songs for the movie industry in Hollywood. Narrated as an old man.