Books: Old West Panorama

TRAIL DRIVING DAYS (264 pp.)—Dee Brown & Martin F. Schmitt—Scribner ($7.50).

The situation in the Mingusville, S. Dak. saloon, that night in 1885, seemed to be stacked against the spectacled dude from the East. A Bad Lands drunkard who had just put a couple of holes in the clock over the bar waved his cocked pistols at the stranger and announced: "Four Eyes is going to set up drinks." Four Eyes paid him no mind, finished warming his hands at the stove, then turned and—as both bullets went wild—knocked the gunman cold with a...