Jennifer Vandermeer hated Kansas. With all her heart, she wished that she'd never left the dull security of Ohio, had never let her husband, Walter, take her from the order and civilization of the East. There was no preacher in Four Corners, Kansas, so Seth Baker, at the behest of his wife, improvised the words. Jennifer, her two young children, and a small group of strangers, listened as they clustered in a spot freshly scythed around the rectangular pit. Walter had not been long among us before he was taken away, but, uh, he was a good, uh, farmer and a good, uh, man... It just didn't make sense. Jennifer had told Walter over and over: "It's ludicrous, neither of us know the first thing about farming." But Walter had been adamant, and they came to Kansas. Now Walter was dead. And Jennifer was marooned in a sea of grass with a farm to take care of and two small children to raise. Where would she go? What would she do? It would be harder than she ever imagined. As she stood over her husband's fresh grave she couldn't know that her life would become a war every day. War against the elements, war against the will of the land, and most of all, a war, every minute of every day, against herself and her fears... For every glorious legend of the Old West there are a thousand workaday stories of the boundless persistence and courage that turned a wilderness into civilization. Jennifer Vandermeer and the story of her hardship, disasters and triumphs, is one of the real stories of how the West was won.

Peter D. Buckow hadn't had much luck in his short life. An abused and neglected child, he struggled hard to overcome the disadvantages of his upbringing. He worked hard as Henry Blough's ranch hand; he labored from sunup 'til sundown; he never shirked a task. But when Henry Blough tries to cheat the sixteen-year-old Buck of his pay, he decides to take his wages out in steers... Caught red handed by the deputy Sheriff, poor Peter Buckow is hanged with his own rope and left for dead. Except Buckow didn't die. He survived and was given an extraordinary chance at a second life. And now he had to choose between the easy path of violence and vengeance, or a life of honest hard work with no guarantee of success.

Back in the winter of '77 I was deputying up in Two Scalp, Dakota Territory; waiting for my friend Clete Shannon-who was the Sheriff there at the time-to say the word for us to quit our jobs and head south...Being Clete's deputy give me mighty little to do but think things over, morning or night. Two Scalp's deader'n a sucker in a sandstorm. This lazy peace would not last. Willie Goodwin had seen a lot of life; he knew how the death wind could blow into a man's life on a clear sunny day without a sip of warning. He thought he knew how treacherous life could be...that's why he drank. When Nell Larson complained that someone was spooking her cattle late at night, neither Willie nor Clete recognized the danger....When Nell's cabin was burned and Nell murdered, and when Clete was shot by the same faceless enemy, Willie saddled his horse and went looking for justice and for the answer to the puzzle of why these horrible crimes were committed. Willie's manhunt would become an odyssey of death and vengeance. It would stretch over mountains, rivers and plains; it would take him through towns, ranches and farms. Along the way, Willie Goodwin would have to decide if friendship was stronger than honor or desire. Willie Goodwin was a simple man with some hard choices...

When his father dies and the family scatters, Erastus ('Rat') Hadley hires on as a hand to a local farmer. Rat is abused and tortured in his new home, but a depression is on and it's a tough time for a young man to be on his own. When Rat's loyal childhood friend Mitch Morris intervenes and the sheriff rescues Rat, his luck changes. Landing a job at last, Rat rides shotgun for the Western Stage Company out of Fort Worth. He quickly picks up a reputation as a crack shot, and as business increases, Rat is able to save towards the small ranch he'd always dreamed of. His steady routine is interrupted when the hero of his childhood, Sheriff Cathcart, asks him to become his deputy. Rat's first duty as deputy is to track down the Oxenberg gang, one of the deadliest groups of bandits in all of Texas. When he draws close to his quarry, Rat is faced with one of the toughest lessons of his life: friendship and old loyalties don't always square with justice and the law.

Pinto Lowery never wanted anything more than the chance to raise a family and find a piece of land he could call his own. But after fighting in the Civil War, he couldn't settle, and instead drifted all over the West breaking mustangs, haunted by the ghosts of his fallen comrades. All that changed in a flash. There didn't seem to be a good reason to leave mustanging to go work on the farm of Mister Tully Oakes while Oakes travels north on a cattle drive. The man had a reputation for being stingy, ornery and contrary. But when Pinto met Elsie Oakes and her young children, an old yearning stirs in his heart and Pinto decided to take Tully's offer, Time goes by quickly when the work is hard. Yet, while the corn is being harvested and everyone is around the fire at night, Pinto can almost fool himself into believing he's found a loving family, and the first secure home he's known since boyhood. But the day of Tully's return looms and the Hannigan gang has taken to raiding the local ranches-imperiling Pinto Lowery's simple dreams of the future.

War had killed 'Glint' McClain's taste for gunfighting. Perhaps that is why a young hardcase could best the famous gunman and leave him for dead on the parched ground of the Arizona desert. Father Miguel finds McClain and nurses him back to health. To repay this kindness, McClain agrees to fight off the Lathrops, local mine owners who are enslaving the Indians in Miguel's parish. Yet despite his Good Samaritan ways, the townspeople want Father Miguel dead-he brings nothing but trouble, they say. And now, the Indians fear him too. Is Father Miguel a man of God or Father Diablo, a lying cheating scoundrel? McClain must take the measure of his savior, before he can take aim at the true enemy.

Former policeman Jay McGraw's job as a messenger for Wells Fargo takes him east on the San Francisco to Chicago run of the Central Pacific. While often routine and boring, guarding the famous Wells Fargo treasure box is a steady job. Rarely does he envy his close friends who still walk a beat in Chinatown. But trouble soon comes his way. Not long into the run, a gang of masked bandits blow up a key bridge on the trail. Jay knows they are after his cargo, even though the train carries other valuable freight. If Wells Fargo loses their heavily insured shipment, Jay will lose his job. However, escaping from the heavily armed, very persistent riders seems impossible. A last-ditch escape effort sees Jay fleeing the bandits by hot-air balloon, only to land in the midst of a deadly range war between cattlemen and Basque sheepherders deep in the Wyoming territory. Despite Jay's remote location, the bandits continue their dogged pursuit of him, and seem willing to risk anything to steal the precious lockbox.

Lee Strate has been shot and left for dead by two men who stole every penny of his $5000 fortune. His life is saved by Jack, a freed black man who agrees to help him track down his money. Heading to Galveston, they discover the thieves are working for the powerful Colonel Benson. Lee and Jack discover that Colonel Benson is involved in agitating racial tension among Galveston s dock workers, the Cotton Jammers. Telling the white workers that the blacks are trying to take over, and telling the blacks that the whites are taking unfair advantage of them, Benson has worked both parties into a frenzy. The unrest is likely to come to a head just when President Grant is due in town.The hunt for the thieves becomes deadly, and Lee and Jack begin to realize the shattering implications of the sinister political plot that has enmeshed them all."

Lizzie Randall, the preacher s pretty daughter, has been discovered brutally murdered. The young Mexican boy Paco Morales is found close to the scene making him a convenient scapegoat to hang for the heinous crime. When the town drunkard Willie Turner claims that Morales is innocent, Sheriff Ward Vincent is forced to investigate the heinous crime more closely. As his investigation progresses, the dark underbelly of the small western town is exposed, and the guilty seem to outnumber the innocent."

Ray Storey left Kansas for one reason: revenge. Assuming the role of Kit Carson in a Medicine Show that travels to small towns around East Texas, he hunts down Sam Hawkins, the brutal murderer of Storey's innocent younger brother. As Ray finally arrives in the same town as his quarry, he is faced with the harsh reality that he might not have the wit or courage to bring the cruel Hawkins brothers to justice. When a man is killed and a woman kidnapped, Storey must throw away his act and shoot with real bullets, or his own life and honor will be forfeit.

When Ryan came riding back into Tularosa people gawped in disbelief. The power-players in town wanted him out of town whether by horse or by casket. His old friends welcomed him, but their faces were shadowed with doubt and hard questions. Why could he make it back to town to see his sister s killer hang when he couldn t be bothered to stay and support her against the treacherous Kane brothers when she was still alive? It doesn t take Ryan long to realize that Billy Kane, who stands to hang, is not his sister s killer. He focuses his attention on the men who first ran him out of town, certain that they know the killer s identity. No matter how long it takes, Ryan is determined to avenge his sister s death and bring her murderer to justice. This time he s not going to allow the powerful forces that control most everything in Tularosa hide the truth."

At the end of the War Between the States, great numbers of rootless, exhausted men and women set out to try and rebuild their lives in the unmapped, untamed freedom of the Great Plains. Noble McCurtain had been sickened by the slaughter of the war-he deserted, seeking a place where he could live in peace. Fleta Corey had waited years for her husband to return from the war, trying desperately to keep herself and her little boy alive. Noble chanced by their cabin just in time to save them from a murderous band of raiders, and they decided to join forces and head west... There, on the Santa Fe Trail, they would find not the peace they were seeking, but danger and death, and love and hope.

Bar-20, originally published in 1906, is one of the original Hopalong Cassidy novels.

Most folks would not trifle with the Hart brothers. Such folks walked. Some folks did not know better. They are planted-not so deep as to keep the cold of the high country from their bones, but deep enough to keep the wolves from their place of repose. That would do. They were well known as gun men, as shootists, as bounty hunters. Their first loyalty was for each other. Their honor was kept for themselves. Wherever they rode the people knew them and their deadly skills. The Hart brothers were going to the Cedar City Rendezvous. The territory was infested with renegades and outlaws; nearly all of them far less honorable and far more rapacious than the very capable Hart brothers. Death and rape and robbery seemed to come out of the ground with the rippling heat like surf against a shore. There seemed to be little that the law and decent citizens could do to stem the tide . . . Until the sheriff of Cedar City, Utah Territory, decided to let the criminal element take care of itself and sent out invitations to the Rendezvous. Hundreds of killers showed up. "You are all here by invitation. There be five miles 'tween here and town. The object is for you to get from here to there . . . alive enough to claim the fortune in gold. Those of you what make it that far will get an equal share. And the Governor's unconditional pardon goes with the loot." A murmur ran thorough the great company armed to its blackened teeth, Some of the shootists thought of saloons and every painted woman between Memphis and Frisco. The Hart Brothers thought of fertile farm land where a body could take root and grow along with crops and children: "Men, the rules be simple: Every man for hisself from here to the edge of town. You have until I get to town to find your place and cover. When I signal with my rifle, this shoot starts!" Before the sheriff was out of sight, the throng exploded in all directions toward rocky hills, scrub brush cover, and small box canyons. For fifteen long minutes there was silence. Then a shot rolled lazily through the stifling heat. A heartbeat later, the thin air erupted with musketry. In the first moments of the Cedar City Rendezvous, a dozen men fell from their saddles and dropped to the salty ground.

Franklin Pierce was president of the United States in 1855, the Mexican War had just ended; the horrors of the American Civil War had not yet begun. The last of the free spirits known as the Mountain Men were securing their place in the legends of the frontier. Among these fierce adventurers was a man who called himself Highpockets. Into the harsh wilderness Highpockets had come to escape the soot of the cities and the terrible memories of war; with nothing but the strength of his heart and hands he had carved out a life of freedom in the nearly inaccessible high places of the Rocky Mountains. In the autumn of his days Highpockets stumbled across a half-frozen, half-dead immigrant boy who had wandered in the snow and ice-terrified after having been separated from the wagon train carrying his Eastern European family across the vast new world. Highpockets called the boy Cub and took him to the wilderness domain the old man called My Mountain. There, for one long winter, they lived together; the young boy learned a new language and a way of life that he'd never even imagined existed. By the end of the winter, the old man knew that Cub had learned everything he needed to know to survive in a land as dangerous as it was awesomely beautiful. It would have to be enough and more than enough . . . for at the end of that winter Highpockets had agreed to face the council of his old enemy, Painted Elk, to atone for the murder of the chief's son. Both Cub and Highpockets would be judged by the council of Elders . . . and both would learn that justice in the high places was both fair . . . and deadly.

THE DEAD MAN S JOURNEY Journada del Muerte, the locals called it: the blistering ocean of sand and sage between the Rio Grande River to the west and the Sacramento mountain range to the east. The bones of men and horses had bleached in the mile-high desert for three hundred years. Spanish conquistadors were the first white men to explore this new furnace of the Southeastern New Mexico Territory and the first to perish. In the thin air, the riders coming down the mountain were sharply etched against the blue sky. Steam, blowing out of the ice-encrusted nostrils of their mounts and their two pack horses, surrounded the horsemen in a white veil. Descending the eastern face of the Sacramento mountains, the horses walked slowly and painfully on cracked hooves. The icy earth offered only a steep path paved with shards of glass; blood seeped around well-worn iron horseshoes. When the riders looked to the sky, they saw that the white sun would stay high enough for them to make Fort Stanton, ten miles into the valley. The riders knew the trail since boyhood. Words were not wasted in country where a man s mouth would crack and bleed like his horse s hooves. Beyond the fort lay the clapboard settlement of Lincoln. When Grady Rourke died, his sons, Sean, Patrick, and Liam, came back to claim the family land . . . What was left of it. It was January, 1878, when the Rourke brothers came back to this hard and dangerous land. They thought they were coming home. What they didn t know was that they were about to become part of a vicious struggle for power. And that they would be forced to choose sides with either John Tunstall and Alexander McSween or J. J. Dolan and Sheriff William Brady. The battle would quickly become the infamous Lincoln County War a dirty little war with no rules, no heroes, and no happy endings. Douglas Savage, the acclaimed author of Cedar City Rendezvous and Highpockets has taken the historical facts surrounding the Lincoln County War and its fascinating characters, and fashioned one of the most readable and revealing tales of the American frontier.