Chartier, JoAnn & Enss, Chris. Love untamed; romances of the Old West.

Globe Pequot, Twodot. 150p. illus. bibliog. index. c2002. 0-7627-1142-6. $10.95. SA

Cole Porter's Annie Get Your Gun introduced a vast number of mid-20th century Americans to the vibrant personality of Annie Oakley. Frank Butler and Annie Oakley were a pair: first as a rather conventional married couple and then as a touring vaudeville team. Annie Oakley proved to be the better shot and crowd pleaser, so her husband stopped appearing on stage and became her manager. They toured in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, and eventually in their own venue until her death in 1926. Frank Butler died within the month. The 13 couples in these stories of true love lived and died, for the most part, in the 19th century. The earliest tale, found in Ruxton's account of life in the West published a decade before the Civil War, is improbable and the stuff of legends. In the 1830s a fur trapper and a Tennessee beauty fell in love, but were separated. They pined for each other for 15 years, until the beauty was rescued by the trapper when the wagon train she was in was attacked by Indians. According to Chartier and Enss (and Ruxton, presumably) the couple married and lived happily ever after. Not so prostitute Cattle Kate and her rancher lover Jim Averill, who were lynched by Wyoming cattlemen intent on enforcing their own rule of law. Ten other romances, some "respectable," some not, round out this collection of Western history.

Photographs and sketches give a notion of what the men and women looked like; most often there are pictures of them together, like the striking photograph of Frances and Tom Noyes prospecting for gold in Alaska. The chapter-by-chapter bibliography is useful and sometimes intriguing: Speaking Ill of the Dead: Jerks in Montana History is the all-time winner of the list. Penelope Power, Libn., Garrison Forest Sch., Owings Mills, MD