Give a Boy a Gun
In this book, the story of Claude Lafayette Dallas, Jr., Olsen takes on perhaps his most challenging assignment -- explicating the curious relationship between a homicidal young "mountain man" and those who saw in his colorful ways the embodiment of the cowboy mystique of the West. On a snow-blown day in January, Dallas killed two game wardens who entered his trapping and poaching camp in ldaho’s Owyhee Desert. The cold-bloodedness of Dallas’s crime shocked the West. Stained with his victim's blood. He confessed to a companion, "This is Murder One for me." Then Claude Dallas vanished into the wild and rugged mountains that had sheltered him for so long. For fifteen long months he was the subject of an international manhunt until the FBI and a drawling country sheriff joined forces to run him to earth in a rain of bullets. To some of Dallas's rustic neighbors the deadly progression from cowboy to poacher to killer seemed justifiable, even admirable.
