In Red Blood and Black Ink, bestselling author David Dary chronicles the long, exciting, often surprising story of journalism in the Old West--from the freewheeling days of the early 1800s to the classic small-town weeklies and busy city newsrooms of the 1920s.

Here are the printers who founded the first papers, arriving in town with a shirttail of type and a secondhand press, setting up shop under trees, in tents, in barns or storefronts, moving on when the town failed, or into larger quarters if it flourished, and sometimes forced to defend their right of free speech with fists or guns.

Here, too, are Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Horace Greeley-and William Allen White writing on the death of his young daughter. Here is the Telegraph and Texas Register article that launched the legend of the Alamo, and dozens of tongue-in-cheek, brilliant, or moving reports of national events and local doings, including holdups, train robberies, wars, elections, shouting matches, weddings, funerals, births, and much, much more.