All Honest Men is based on the true-life story of J. Willis Newton, a feisty sharecropper's son who fled the Texas cotton fields to become the leader of the most successful band of outlaws in American history. It is also a window into one of the country's most pivotal eras, the early twentieth century—when the United States was passing from a primarily rural society into an industrialized and urban one, and the American Dream was changing from owning a patch of land to making "big money."