Jack Olsen (1925–2002)

This was a highly readable book about the story of Claude Dallas, the culture of guns, hunting, and trapping in the rural American west, and the failings of our criminal justice system.

The author is a compelling storyteller, so the actual storyline about Claude Dallas's life, the murders, and the trial is easy to read and engaging. Additionally, the author interviewed so many people and painted such a vivid picture of the actors involved in the case that I felt as if I had a real glimpse of show more the culture in northern Nevada and southern Idaho.

This book was written awhile ago, but it is nonetheless relevant today, given the current situation with Cliven Bundy and his free-roaming cattle in Nevada. Claude Dallas held similar views about the government's role in land management, hunting, and trapping, and styled himself a live-off-the-land mountain man (who clung to this self-image despite the fact that he needed people to bring him provisions, including pudding, while he "wintered" "alone" in the wilderness). The most fascinating part of the book is the description of the juror deliberations and the "Dallas cheerleaders" who showed up in court to support a guy who gave less than compelling evidence of self defense. So many people rallied around Dallas, jurors included, because they believed that a guy with such a charming and folksy disposition had to be justified. I'd be curious to see if these same people, who liberally used racist language, would feel similarly if a non-white person had committed the same act. The book definitely exposes some of the enormous problems with juror bias.

One final note. I am giving the book four stars because the content is great, but I'd give it zero stars if I were judging it based on the Kindle formatting. I've read other older books that have clearly been converted into e-reader format, but this one is far and away the worst conversion I've ever seen. The formatting errors and typos make the book almost unreadable at some points, and one read-through by a semi-literate editor would've caught 99% of the errors. show less

Oh, shit! I don't usually read these 'true crime' bks for a slew of reasons. &, now, here I am reviewing them. I'm severely disturbed by knowing about these people b/c I'm hyper-aware that they're really HERE, they're really w/ us, AND they're inside US too. I'm sickened by the people who vicariously get off on these things, who see such crimes as 'entertainment' safely viewed from a distance. There is no safe distance.

Being an introspective person, I study the psychopathology in myself - & show more reading about the psychopathology of someone like mass murderer & torturer Dean Corll is almost like knowing that there's a tumor in one's own brain that's eating away at everything that one values about one's self - except that, in this case, what's being eaten away is not in my personal body but in the body politic.

& Corll, like many others of his ilk, had accomplices. The back cover of the bk advertises it w/ this: "How could almost thirty teen-age boys from the same neighborhood disappear without a trace?" The parental warning "Don't take candy from strangers" might've originated w/ Dean Corll. I don't know. He wasn't the only one who used candy as a lure but he might be the only one who actually had a candymaking business.

I think my aversion to Houston probably started w/ reading this bk. I already have a low opinion of Texas as a place that produces an abnormally high percentage of deranged killers, after all, look at the president, but reading this bk made me feel like kidnapping, raping, torturing, & killing teen-age boys was little more than an average day in the average life of some average people in an average neighborhood in Houston. These particular crimes didn't happen w/o a social enviroment that supported it somehow - if only by being so sexually oppressive that for males like Corll this was the 'logical' outlet.

& what about the people who WRITE these bks? How many have a sincere drive to take a hard look at what's there that 'normals' wd rather be in denial about? I think of someone like Genesis P. Orridge as being in the category of sincere investigators (even though he hasn't written such a bk). How many write them for the money? Knowing that such 'sensational crimes' are hot items for the flip side of the very same 'normals'? The 'sickness' of alienated capitalist society (or, perhaps, any large society) is the very same 'sickness' that produces people like Corll & people like the people who surreptitiously get off on Corll at the same time that they hypocritically disavow the possibility of the potential to BE HIM w/in themselves. show less

This was a highly readable book about the story of Claude Dallas, the culture of guns, hunting, and trapping in the rural American west, and the failings of our criminal justice system.

The author is a compelling storyteller, so the actual storyline about Claude Dallas's life, the murders, and the trial is easy to read and engaging. Additionally, the author interviewed so many people and painted such a vivid picture of the actors involved in the case that I felt as if I had a real glimpse of show more the culture in northern Nevada and southern Idaho.

This book was written awhile ago, but it is nonetheless relevant today, given the current situation with Cliven Bundy and his free-roaming cattle in Nevada. Claude Dallas held similar views about the government's role in land management, hunting, and trapping, and styled himself a live-off-the-land mountain man (who clung to this self-image despite the fact that he needed people to bring him provisions, including pudding, while he "wintered" "alone" in the wilderness). The most fascinating part of the book is the description of the juror deliberations and the "Dallas cheerleaders" who showed up in court to support a guy who gave less than compelling evidence of self defense. So many people rallied around Dallas, jurors included, because they believed that a guy with such a charming and folksy disposition had to be justified. I'd be curious to see if these same people, who liberally used racist language, would feel similarly if a non-white person had committed the same act. The book definitely exposes some of the enormous problems with juror bias.

One final note. I am giving the book four stars because the content is great, but I'd give it zero stars if I were judging it based on the Kindle formatting. I've read other older books that have clearly been converted into e-reader format, but this one is far and away the worst conversion I've ever seen. The formatting errors and typos make the book almost unreadable at some points, and one read-through by a semi-literate editor would've caught 99% of the errors. show less

Obviously Olsen is quite taken with Glacier National Park and the first section of the book is devoted to a close examination of the flora and fauna of that region before he delves into the habits of Ursa Horribilis, otherwise known as the Grizzly Bear. They are huge creatures, standing erect sometimes close to eight feet tall and despite their size can run faster than you’ll ever hope to. Their habitat has been under pressure for decades: “ ...the destruction of the forests in which he show more could hide, the plowing of the plains on which he grazed, the stringing of thousands of miles of barbed wire, and the pervading, unpleasant stink of man, who only smells good to himself and his fellow man, and not always then. The grizzly of the plains, as was his custom, backed into the final square miles of American wilderness, avoiding a fight. He is holed up there today, his numbers reduced to less than 1,000, perhaps as few as 500, his range restricted more or less to a few states: Montana, Wyoming....”

Grizzlies had been living in Glacier National Park for decades and their relationship with humans had been a comfortable one, each leaving the other alone. In 1967, however, an emaciated bear was seen foraging in garbage cans around Kelly’s Campground. The permanent residents noticed his strange behavior and warned the rangers that this bear was not acting normally, standing his ground when yelled at instead of running away.

The Park Service was torn, clearly it had a rogue grizzly on its hands, yet the ethic was to leave the wildlife as intact as possible. The visitors didn’t take numerous warnings seriously and the end result, a combination of negligence and procrastination coupled with some rule violations and insouciance resulted in two deaths and a mauling.

Several years ago, my wife and I went horseback riding in Glacier National Park. We had been told there had never been an attack on a person while on horseback. Just the following week, a group of riders ran into a large grizzly on the same trail we had been riding. When one of the children fell off his horse and attracted the interest of the bear,one of the guides reflexively charged the bear on “Tonk” a huge horse (part Percheron and 18 hands high -- I owned a large Arab that was 16 hands and he was big) that must have terrified the bear for he took off. The horse and wrangler made it on Letterman. The Letterman show can be seen here. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHAlYW_rqCY)

Olsen writes well and I must say the scenes describing the human/grizzly interactions are the stuff of nightmares. show less