Joe Pappalardo writes history the way it should be written — loud, unruly, drenched in blood and whiskey, peppered with characters who refuse to be forgotten.
His latest book, “Four Against the West: The True Saga of a Frontier Family That Reshaped the Nation — and Created a Legend,” continues this legacy. It follows the four Bean brothers — Roy, Sam, James, and Joshua — who each left their mark on the Old West, navigating battlefields, courtrooms, and saloons, somehow able to bounce around the Wild West at its most unruly.
‘More reporting is always the answer. If you’re in a jam, call another expert, pull another record, find another angle.’
Roy Bean, famously dubbed “the Law West of the Pecos,” may be the most recognizable of the bunch, and while the book opens with him, Pappalardo makes it clear that the real story is a family saga, not just a single outlaw-turned-lawman myth, although navigating that mythology is a huge part of the fun.
“I thought, let’s do a quadruple biography, candy-cane their experiences together,” Pappalardo told me. “You’ve got a pretty good book that really covers everything about the Old West — the Santa Fe Trail, California, New Mexico, the Civil War, the Mexican-American War. How could you go wrong?”
Just tell the story
I caught up with Pappalardo in early February, three months into his book promotion tour, fresh from a lecture taping for C-SPAN.
As a nonfiction author, Pappalardo captures the enormity of life with cinematic grit, even in his account of the history of the sunflower. What you get when you read his books is writing that breathes, scenes full of motion, carried by sentences that are fun to read.
It’s full of vivid passages like this one, the kind that lift you into the beauty and commotion:
The steamboat creeps innocently upriver, sternwheel churning a wake that shimmers in the moonlight. The vessel is loaded with passengers from New Orleans, where an insidious disease is emerging among recent immigrants there. And some on board, destined for the docks at Kansas City, are contagious.
It’s readable without losing the mysterious vitality of literature. In an era of gimmickry, Pappalardo achieves a forgotten maxim among writers: “Just tell the damn story.”
Pappalardo eschews the jumbled postmodern approach, where time is scattered into shards of disassembled events, for the river-like flow of a sequence in natural order. Better yet, he scripts the historical account in present tense, so the movement feels constant. This intensifies the animating spirit of the era, growing in the reader with each turn of the page: go west, go west, go west.
Manifest destiny
Details. Richness. Scenery. Color. The blood of existence. You get access to the thoughts and feelings and secrets of the characters. Immediately, you’re pulled into their minds, even their souls.
But while “Four Against the West” reads like fiction, all of it has been meticulously verified, woven so nimbly that even the footnotes feel native.
There’s so much nature, so much wildness, so much rugged earth. All the more beautiful when civilization crashes into it, punctured by slavery or cholera.
Like this passage:
Joshua Bean walks out of the Gil’s house, savoring the sunset view of the harbor, the rolling hills of the Mission Valley, and the mountains stretching off to his right. A dirt road from Old Town follows the north bank of the valley to Mission San Diego. The open land surrounding San Diego is crawling with roaming cattle, and every so often he can spot bacteria in sombreros and loose-fitting white shirts, trailing the herd on horseback or lounging in the shade of trees.
Pappalardo’s craftsmanship is silent. One device he uses, for example, is suppositional narrative — he tells us what the characters “must have” felt.
In order to pull this off, a writer has to have gathered an incredible amount of information, far more than what winds up in print.
Then he sprinkles in philosophical observations and moral principles. He captures the social and political realities that dictated the era. Commerce, education, transportation, health, leisure. Legal theory, military strategy, economic orthodoxy, religious dogma — all captured by the flux of the narrative.
Even food and drink: You taste as you read.
Granular details
There’s quite a skeletal system underneath the swirl of this long-form creative nonfiction. Pappalardo fortifies all this storytelling with data.
His background at Popular Mechanics, the Smithsonian, and the Associated Press trained him to dig deep.
“More reporting is always the answer,” he told me. “If you’re in a jam, call another expert, pull another record, find another angle.”
His approach avoids the sweeping generalizations that plague many histories. Instead, he focuses on the beautiful minutiae of the characters he resurrects.
“You learn history better when you see it through the eyes of the people who were there,” he said. That means looking at what they ate, where they drank, how they survived.
Pappalardo’s obsession with granular details led him to Roy Bean’s time in San Antonio, where the infamous judge presided over spectacle and chaos.
Law and disorder
Bean’s story proved irresistible to the anti-Hollywood postmodernists of the 1970s, filmmakers who fought the industry’s sanitized depictions of history — often at the cost of their own careers.
The real Roy Bean — born Phantley Roy Bean Jr. — was no frontier hero. He was a con artist, a rootless huckster who turned justice into a sideshow. His courtroom was a saloon, his rulings improvised, more entertainment than law.
“Roy didn’t just pass through places — he got run out of them. That tells you something.”
The self-styled “hanging judge” is often portrayed as a rough-edged arbiter of frontier justice. In reality, Pappalardo said, Bean was more of a frontier grifter than a judge. “He brought more crime and disorder to his small town than he ever supplied in law and order.”
Still, Roy Bean is the hook, and his mythology looms large.
“Four Against the West” tears down the myths of Roy Bean to reveal the man beneath: outlaw and lawman, con artist and businessman, drifter and legend.
“Roy Bean is sort of a clown later in life,” Pappalardo tells me. ”He was a pioneer for celebrities who were famous only for being celebrities. So he’s a modern creation in a lot of ways. He’s a modern man in that way, coming out of this frontier. And yet he is the symbol of the frontier for a lot of people.”
Assume it’s a lie
When asked how much of Roy Bean’s legend he had to discard, Pappalardo was blunt: “If I didn’t know for sure, it didn’t go in.”
He said that while most of Bean’s biographers did a solid job of documenting his life, Roy himself was an unreliable narrator. “If Roy tells a story, assume it’s a lie. If his brothers contradict him, assume they’re telling the truth.”
One of the biggest revelations came from old newspapers that painted a different picture of Roy’s infamous rope burns — the supposed result of an attempted lynching.
“We don’t actually know what happened,” Pappalardo said, “but we do know he was shot while raging drunk in a store, and the newspaper basically said, ‘Good riddance.’”
That kind of detail reshapes history, giving it the rough texture of real life instead of the clean arc of a Hollywood Western.
“Four Against the West” does just that, peeling back the myth to reveal the men who lived, fought, and lost on the frontier.
In their brother’s shadow
Because Roy Bean’s brothers each shaped the West in their own ways.
“At least two of them,” Pappalardo said, “are probably more historically significant than Roy.”
Sam became the first sheriff in Doña Ana County, New Mexico.
Joshua was the first mayor of American San Diego and an early militia leader.
James saw both success and failure in Missouri, where he played the role of both lawman and first responder.
Together, their lives paint a messier, more complex portrait of a time when civilization and lawlessness blurred.
That’s the history Pappalardo thrives on — the kind that sprawls beyond legend, tangled in contradictions and larger-than-life figures.
“People think these guys were shaping some grand arc of manifest destiny,” Pappalardo said. “But really, they were just trying to get by.”
A crucial breakthrough
Pappalardo spent time in New Mexico, Texas, and California, sifting through archives, walking old trails, and standing in the ruins of railroad camps.
“Going to places always delivers the best stuff,” he said. “You don’t know what you’re going to find until you crack the pages open.”
One of his biggest discoveries came in Mesilla, New Mexico, where he unearthed a never-published interview with Sam Bean. “It was huge,” he said. “There it was, the story of his falling out with Roy and how they reconciled at the end of their lives. I didn’t have an ending until I found that.”
He also spent time at Roy’s old haunts, including the ruins of his first saloon. “You know you’re in the right spot when the ground is covered in broken beer bottles,” he joked.
The forgotten Bean
Of the four brothers, James Bean is the least known, but his story struck a chord with Pappalardo. “He was Independence, Missouri’s justice of the peace, what a justice of the peace should be — unlike Roy, who was a mockery of the role.”
James had terrible luck, getting caught up in a marriage scandal and finding himself at the center of violent crimes. But he took his responsibilities seriously, acting as first responder to suicides and murders.
James’ final years were spent in a poor farm, where he organized a library to give the other residents something to read.
“Even after everything that happened to him, he still had that Bean spark,” Pappalardo said. “And he made sure his story made it into the newspapers, so someone like me would find it.”
A knack for showing up
What emerges from Pappalardo’s work is not just a history of four men but a panorama of an era that refuses to sit quietly in textbooks, too often lost in the antics of fiction.
It’s raw, violent, full of schemes and ambition, and populated by men who, for better or worse, made their mark. Their stories live on, not in sanitized myth but in the dust and grit where they were truly forged.
The gift of “Four Against the West” is the cohesion it accomplishes in capturing the full story.
Despite their flaws, the Bean brothers had a knack for showing up at pivotal moments in history. Whether leading militias, running saloons, or getting tangled in gunfights, they were always in the thick of it. And while Roy Bean became the pop-culture icon, Pappalardo’s book gives his brothers their due.
“The frontier wasn’t a neat, heroic place,” Pappalardo said. “It was a mess. And these guys thrived in the mess.”
Culture, Westerns, History, Old west, Judge roy bean, Bean brothers, Kevin ryan, Four against the west, Books, Book review, Entertainment, Joe pappalardo, Interview
