Born in Kentucky, the Bean brothers\u2014James, Samuel, Joshua, and Roy\u2014were living emblems of westward expansion. All possessed, to varying degrees, something of the rule-evading, even lawless ethos of the Anglo conquest, from outright murder to the mere gaming of the system. Trade brought some brothers west, war others; several thrived in an economy of contraband goods, stolen livestock, and enslaved people. Indeed, Roy, living in Confederate-inclined New Mexico, \u201cdream[ed] aloud of importing slaves to create a lavish ranch,\u201d writes Pappalardo. Roy, the youngest, is the brother best known by name today\u2014but in almost every respect incorrectly, for the supposed lawman, while worse than most of the criminals in his corner of Texas, was a genius at self-invention. On that note, all the brothers were skilled at convincing their fellow westward-ho types that they were natural leaders of men, and indeed a couple of them were, elected to office in California and New Mexico. For his part, Roy, writes Pappalardo, paraphrasing a contemporary, was \u201ca scoundrel capable of bravery and chicanery.\u201d The author\u2019s penchant for dramatizing proves wearing (\u201chead flung backward at an impossible angle, the red crescent of his slit throat stretched open and yawning\u201d). Still, fans of the Wild West as viewed under the revisionist lens will applaud Pappalardo\u2019s dismantling of Roy Bean\u2019s mostly self-made myth, promoted uncritically and even embellished by John Huston\u2019s 1972 film The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, with Paul Newman turning a very bad guy into a lovable eccentric.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Born in Kentucky, the Bean brothers\u2014James, Samuel, Joshua, and Roy\u2014were living emblems of westward expansion. All possessed, to varying degrees, something of the rule-evading, even lawless ethos of the Anglo conquest, from outright murder to the mere gaming of the system. Trade brought some brothers west, war others; several thrived in an economy of contraband […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1174,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1173"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1173\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}