On October 5, 1892, the last of the major outlaw gangs of the Old West was destroyed in a gun battle in Coffeyville, a small town in southeastern Kansas. When the smoke cleared, eight men were dead and three others were seriously injured. Four of the dead were members of the notorious Dalton Gang: Dick Broadwell, Bill Powers, and two brothers, Bob and Grat Dalton. A fifth outlaw, twenty-one-year-old Emmett Dalton, was captured alive but with twenty-three bullet and buckshot wounds.

Emmett Dalton not only survived Coffeyville but prospered. After serving a fourteen-year prison term at the Kansas state penitentiary, he moved to Southern California. In a world completely foreign to him, he published two accounts of his and his brothers' exploits (both of which were made into movies) and became a celebrity who worked with the first generation of Hollywood cowboys and one of Los Angeles's most respected property developers.

Ian Shaw's Into the Sunset is the remarkable story of Emmett Dalton and how he and his brothers drifted from one side of the law to the other in the frontier lands of the late nineteenth century. It is the story of shoot-'em-ups and train robberies, of the closing frontier, and of what desperate men in desperate times do to survive. Following Dalton to California, Shaw tells the story of how Emmett was able to live a life that would become the stuff of legend and achieve the level of success that was once the object of each member of the Dalton Gang.

Ian W. Shaw has published eight books of Australian and military history, including The Rag Tag Fleet: The Unknown Story of the Australian Men and Boats That Helped Win the War in the Pacific and Operation Babylift: The Incredible Story of the Inspiring Australian Women Who Rescued Hundreds of Orphans at the End of the Vietnam War.