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In later years people often asked Hugh Hitchcock about the Canadian River cowboy strike of 1883. Wagon boss Hugh Hitchcock knows the cowboy life better than most: In 1883 if you're a cowboy, you can't own a cow and you are stigmatized as a drunk. Worse, you are exploited by the wealthy cattle owners who fence the range, replace traditions and trust with written rules of employment, refuse to pay a livable wage and change things that ought to be left...
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"The Time It Never Rained was inspired by actual events, when the longest and most severe drought in living memory pressed ranchers and farmers to the outer limits of courage and endurance."-Elmer Kelton, Seven-time Spur Award-winning author
Rio Seco was too small to afford a professional manager for its one-room Chamber of Commerce.
And Rio Seco, meaning "dry river" in Spanish, symbolizes the biggest enemy of the ranchers and farmers in 1950s Texas,...
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Hewey Calloway has a problem. In his west Texas home of 1906, the land and way of life he loves are changing too quickly. As Hewey struggles against the relentless stream of progress, he comes to realize that the simple life of his childhood is vanishing - and that every choice he makes requires a sacrifice. --
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Ivan Doig grew up in the rugged wilderness of western Montana among the sheepherders and denizens of small-town saloons and valley ranches. What he deciphers from his past with piercing clarity is not only a raw sense of land and how it shapes us but also of the ties to our mothers and fathers, to those who love us, and our inextricable connection to those who shaped our values in our search for intimacy, independence, love, and family. A powerfully...
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In 1875, nearly forty years after the Mexican War, Mexicans and Texans are still spilling blood over ownership of the Nueces Strip--a hot, dry stretch of coastal prairie that bushwackers and horse thieves have turned into a lawless hell.
Captain L.H. McNelly, a complex and determined Confederate veteran, is brought into the Nueces Strip for one purpose: to keep the peace. His measures are harsh and controversial--but McNelly wasn't sent in to be...
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A six-time winner of the Western Writers of America's Spur Award, Elmer Kelton is the premier Western storyteller of his time. Eyes of the Hawk, winner of the Spur Award for Best Western Novel, is an outstanding tale of Texas--filled with authentic characters and history, and telling the story of the outstanding courage and determination of the men and women who challenged an unyielding wilderness to build a frontier legend.
Thomas Canfield descends...
7) Morning star
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Driven from his home, a Rebel finds a place among the Cheyenne. Joel Ryan returns from the Civil War with grey hair and a weary heart, but he finds no rest in Kentucky. Turned away by a brother who still blames Joel for abandoning the family to fight for the Confederate cause, Joel rides west, searching for peace in the untamed wilderness of Montana. Instead, against all odds, he finds love. When he sees the gang of thugs tormenting the young Cheyenne...
10) Dark thicket
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Donovan: Donovan was supposed to be dead. The town of Dry Fork, southern Texas, had buried him years before when Uncle Joe Vickers had fired off both barrels of a shotgun into the vicious outlaw's face as he was escaping from jail. Now, Uncle Joe has been shot-in just the same way. And Judge Upshaw had found a noose hanging on his door. It looked as though Donovan was back-gunning for the people who had tracked him down and tried him. Sheriff Webb...
11) Lassiter
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Before Lassiter has a chance to become a legend, he must survive his hard-scrabble younger days. Throwing everything he has into a partnership on a cattle ranch, he hopes to make his mark honestly. But an unscrupulous rival quickly emerges and threatens to derail Lassiter's dreams before they even leave the station. It isn't long before the daring young man with deadly aim finds himself hunted by a bunch of thugs with plenty of kills to their credit....
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The hero Lassiter is called into the town of Bluegate to help Josh Falconer save his failing business. But Lassiter arrives too late, and Josh has already made an untimely departure from the land of the living. Now Lassiter will move heaven and earth to punish those responsible.
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From one of the West's greatest living storytellers, winner of numerous awards, including the Spur, the Golden Saddleman, and the Western Heritage Award, here is Elmer Kelton's magnificent new novel of the wildcat West Texas oil boom of the 1920s. It used to be that the worst crime in Caprock was moonshining or lying about your Saturday night date on Sunday morning-until someone struck oil. Now the scent of the stuff has brought every dreamer, drifter,...
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In the Texas backlands in 1885, twelve-year-old Joey Shipman's father dies under mysterious circumstances, and the boy is forced to live with his stepmother and Blair Meacham, a hanger-on at the farm. After the death of a black farmhand and friend, and another "accident”, that almost takes Joey's life, the boy runs away and joins forces with his only kin-Beau Shipman, a drunk and a jailbird. Beau, along with an outlaw, a San Antonio prostitute,...
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WHERE THE LIVING IS HARD AND THE KILLING IS EASY... It's in the lawless Indian Territory that Daniel Strange meets his demise. Riding his chestnut mare to Texas to buy himself some cattle, the best gunsmith in St. Joseph, Missouri, gets waylaid by a pack of murdering outlaws. His lifeless body is left dangling at the end of a rope -- robbing his family of a loving husband and father. ...DEATH CAN'T KEEP A GOOD MAN DOWN Now, a mysterious gunslinger...
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Often hailed as the heir apparent to Wallace Stegner, Ivan Doig is among the finest chroniclers of the contemporary American West. In Mountain Time, Lexa McCaskell and Mitch Rozier leave their Seattle home to visit Mitch's dying father in Montana. There Mitch clashes with both Lexa and his father as events from the past are explored and difficult memories resurface.
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"Parker Stanley's family had a dream: to start a new life in the Far West. But en route, a Cheyenne band slaughters his parents and abducts his sister, leaving him for dead. Then a cowboy named Clay Springer rides to the rescue - and comes up with an idea. He's got a team ready to deliver goods to the Mormons in Utah, but he's short on funds for supplies. He knows that Parker managed to hold on to his family's savings, so he suggests a fifty-fifty...
19) Bloodroot
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Lawyer-turned-herbalist China Bayles returns to the Deep South, where her family?s legacy of silence is at last broken?and the past finally, unforgettably, speaks the truth? A frantic phone call from her mother brings China back to her family?s Mississippi plantation?a place she?d forsaken long ago. But the late-spring air is thick with fear?and from the moment of her arrival, China knows that something has gone desperately wrong at Jordan?s Crossing....
20) The Chili Queen
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Her protective instincts brought out by Emma, who was sent to New Mexico to marry a man she has never met, Addie French takes her new friend under her wing, and the pair begins unfolding secrets, hatching schemes, and questioning everything they once believed.