In the winter of 1901, James W. Jarrott led a band of twenty-five homesteader families toward the Llano Estacado in far West Texas, newly opened for settlement by a populist Texas legislature. But frontier cattlemen who had been pasturing their herds on the unfenced prairie land were enraged by the encroachment of these "nesters." In August 1902 a famous hired assassin, Jim Miller, ambushed and murdered J. W. Jarrott. Who hired Miller? This crime has never been solved, until now. Award-winning author Bill Neal investigates this cold case and successfully pieces together all the threads of circumstantial evidence to fit the noose snugly around the neck of Jim Miller's employer. What emerges from these pages is the strength of intriguing characters in an engrossing narrative: Jim Jarrott, the diminutive advocate who fearlessly champions the cause of the little guy. The ruthless assassin, Deacon Jim Miller. And finally Jarrott's young widow Mollie, who perseveres and prospers against great odds and tells the settlers to "Stay put!"
Bill Neal practiced criminal law in West Texas for forty years. He is the author of Vengeance Is Mine: The Scandalous Love Triangle That Triggered the Boyce-Sneed Feud (UNT Press); Getting Away with Murder on the Texas Frontier; and Skullduggery, Secrets, and Murders.
"Death on the Lonely Llano Estacado has many qualities that can be compared to a Zane Gray novel. The story of farmers fighting the odds to live on the unsettled Plains. Ranchers opposing the 'sod busters' at every turn. Gun fights that made the West wild. But it's all true and documented."--Panhandle Plains Historical Review "[T]his book provides the most thorough account of [Jim] Miller to date. While the author's main focus is Miller's role in Jarrott's murder, he also chronicles the killer's entire career. . . . The accounts of the homesteader's experiences are well worth reading. But the Jim Miller material makes the book indispensable for lawman/outlaw collectors and readers."--Wild West History Association Journal "Neal's account of the settling of the South Plains, the clash between homesteaders and cattleman, the assassination of J. W. Jarrott, the killer's remarkable but brutal life of murders and scams, and the person who hired the killer to kill Jarrott, makes for a quite impressive investigation of a cold case more than one hundred years old."--Southwestern Historical Quarterly "Author Bill Neal, a criminal law attorney living in West Texas, has carefully threaded his way through an Old West history-mystery unsolved until now. His writing is sharp and precise, no words wasted."--Chronicle of the Old West "[A] must-read for anyone interested in history, law and mystery. . . . I think this book should someday be a movie. The story is gripping, powerful and dramatic, a classic trailblazing and courageous advocate for the little people tale, featuring the most contemptible of villains, and true history."--Lubbock Law Notes "Thoroughly accessible to readers of all backgrounds . . . . [A] riveting true-life page-turner."--Midwest Book Review "Death on the Lonely Llano Estacado is emblematic of some of the best history storytelling that is being produced in the Western history genre. It is a coherent blend of solid historical inquiry and crime scene investigation. This book, while a 'cold case' thriller highlighting a crime and punishment theme, is significant because it features prominently the difficulty of pioneering West Texas in a time when the frontier epoch was supposedly over."--Tai Kreidler, Deputy Director of the Southwest Collection, Texas Tech University and editor of Nikkei Farmer on the Nebraska Plains "Neal has 'closed the book' on this cold case from the turn of the century. A historian without the legal training could not have been able to reconstruct the happenings as skillfully as Neal has. This work could have been the inspiration of the motion picture Open Range, with the conflict of the cattle king destroying the interloper on his range."--Chuck Parsons, author of The Sutton-Taylor Feud and Captain John R. Hughes
