Reviewed by: Bloody Bill Longley: The Mythology of a Gunfighter Robert Christopher Poister Bloody Bill Longley: The Mythology of a Gunfighter. By Rick Miller. Foreword by David Johnson. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2011. Pp. 390. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9781574413052, $29.95 cloth.) Reconstruction's social changes and the uncertainties of its aftermath bred violence throughout the South. Primarily directed at freed men and women, this uncertainty migrated with a population to the West, where its associated violence took on different forms. Some young men, like Jesse James, took advantage of the uncertainty to continue fighting the war and became folk heroes in the process. Others, however, used the uncertainty as an excuse to become violent without further reason. William Preston Longley seems to fall into this latter category. In his biography, Bloody Bill Longley: The Mythology of a Gunfighter, Rick Miller casts Longley as a wayward youth without creed or direction. In Texas, which had been the extreme west of the Confederacy, Longley enjoyed a unique environment. Growing up in a Southern place with Western space, he had an excuse to be violent but, Miller asserts, not a reason. Longley's father was an avowed Unionist, and though Longley did not subscribe to his father's views, his violence was not a backlash against them. Although his mean streak began with the socially accepted harassing of ex-slaves, he soon left Texas and entered a life of homicidal crimes, killing and working his way through some of the most iconic lifestyles of the Old West: cowboy, cavalryman, even living with the Snake Indians for a time. Or so Longley claimed. In 1877, having been caught, convicted, and sentenced to hang, Longley began to build his own myth by writing letters of his exploits to newspapers. Detailing a ten year crime and adventure spree, Longley wrote of himself as a dashing, roguish gunfighter, and this mythology only grew after his trip to the gallows. Miller, like the two Longley biographers he succeeds, relies heavily on these letters—Longley's own embellished account—to recreate the bandit's life. Despite an impressive amount of detective work, which included digging into census, county, and army records, newspapers and memoirs, Miller ends more than one excerpt from Longley's first-person tale with "the story cannot be corroborated" (27), "there is no record to corroborate Longley's claim" (48), or "his version of events . . . can only be repeated, not corroborated" (77). This is not due to a lack of investigation on Miller's part, but to a lack of sources relating to Longley. From the surprising evidence he has assembled, however, Miller convincingly argues that Longley was a raconteur and braggart, but not a [End Page 86] pistolero or gunfighter. Despite the myth he built for himself, Longley was not on the same criminal level as John Wesley Hardin, Jesse James, or Billy the Kid. Miller attributes Longley with five murders, none of which show any panache or bravado on the killer's part. One victim was shot in the back; another was unarmed. One was a reverend killed while milking a cow. It may seem strange to argue the level of criminality among murderers, and at times Miller's choice of words—that Longley "does not seem to merit any glorification as a significant gunfighter," for example—may leave readers aghast as to why any murderer should be glorified (296). But he is right that the folkloric quality built up around Longley and others did not die with them, and his book is an interesting look at a process that shaped much of America's cultural memory. Best of all, however, it reads like an old fashioned western yarn, embracing its subject's hyperbole for the whizzing bullets and dusty trails of Texas and the Old West. Robert Christopher Poister University of Georgia Copyright © 2012 The Texas State Historical Association