The Sheriff, opens with an aging Sheriff Donovan coming to terms with his recent diagnosis of terminal cancer. Desperate to maintain his tenuous grasp on Three Chop, the town he willed into existence, Donovan enters into a bargain with a faction of rural Christian Prohibitionists, agreeing to shutter the local saloon and brothel. But his plan to ......
The Beaten Territory tells the story of Annie Ryan, a woman who is running a second-rate brothel in 1890s Denver with an eye toward expansion. By chance she encounters Lydia Chambers, a society woman suffering from a laudanum habit and a bad marriage, who owns a prized property on the infamous Market Street. Annie's fortunes at the brothel turn on ......
Originally published in 1963, Monte Walsh continues to delight readers as a Western classic and popular favorite. The novel explores the cowboy lives of Monte Walsh and Chet Rollins as they carouse, ride, and work at the Slash Y with Cal Brennan. As the West changes and their cowboy antics are challenged, the two must part ways to pursue new ways ......
"Old Jake Hanlon sits on the edge of the mesa and looks out over miles of southwestern plain," starts Jack Schaefer's all-ages novel Mavericks. Old Jake Hanlon is "ancient and craglike, weathered and withered . . . something like a worn rocky butte himself." Living in his memories, Hanlon prefers to reflect on his youth, when he lived every ......
The classic Western short stories in this Jack Schaefer collection explore the changing and often challenging truths found throughout the American West. The featured novella, "The Kean Land," tells the story of young Ben Hammon as he arrives in western Colorado after the death of his parents to live with his small-town lawman uncle. The drama ......
As Scout McBride navigates the rugged path to becoming a man, he knows that to emulate the men he admires, he must keep one thing in mind: Cowboys don't cry.
Blood Meridian (1985), Cormac McCarthy's epic tale of an otherwise nameless "kid" who in his teens joins a gang of licensed scalp hunters whose marauding adventures take place across Texas, Chihuahua, Sonora, Arizona, and California during 1849 and 1850, is widely considered to be one of the finest novels of the Old West, as well as McCarthy's ......
The Life and Times of John Wesley Hardin / Bruce Mcginnis.
Neither a fictional biography of notorious Texas gunman John Wesley Hardin nor an actual one, Reflections in Dark Glass is based on the personal reminiscences of individuals who knew Hardin best. The book deals with relationships and details not found in the existing literature about the life of Hardin and covers the period from his boyhood to the ......