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Man of the Family (Hardcover)
Ralph Moody; Illustrated by Edward Shenton
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R667
R567
Discovery Miles 5 670
Save R100 (15%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Skinny and suffering from diabetes, Ralph Moody is ordered by a
Boston doctor to seek a more healthful climate. Going west again is
a delightful prospect. His childhood adventures on a Colorado ranch
were described in Little Britches and Man of the Family, also Bison
Books. Now nineteen years old, he strikes out into new territory
hustling odd jobs, facing the problem of getting fresh milk and
leafy green vegetables. He scrapes around to survive, risking his
neck as a stunt rider for a movie company. With an improvident
buddy named Lonnie, he camps out in an Arizona canyon and "shakes
the nickel bush" by sculpting plaster of paris busts of lawyers and
bankers. This is 1918, and the young men travel through the
Southwest not on horses but in a Ford aptly named Shiftless. New
readers and old will enjoy this entry in the continuing saga of
Ralph Moody. Purchase the audio edition.
Ralph Moody, just turned twenty, had only a dime in his pocket when
he was put off a freight in western Nebraska. It was the Fourth of
July in 1919. Three months later he owned eight teams of horses and
rigs to go with them. Everyone who worked with him shared in the
prosperity—the widow whose wheat crop was saved and the group of
misfits who formed a first-rate harvesting crew. But sometimes
fickle Mother Nature and frail human nature made sure that nothing
was easy. The tension between opposing forces never lets up in this
book. Without preaching, The Dry Divide warmly illustrates the
old-time virtues of hard work ingenuity, and respect for others.
The Ralph Moody who was a youngster in Little Britches and who grew
up without a father and with early responsibilities in Man of the
Family, The Fields of Home, The Home Ranch, Mary Emma &
Company, and Shaking the Nickel Bush (all Bison Books) has become a
man to reckon with in The Dry Divide. Purchase the audio edition.
The fatherless Moody family moved from Colorado to Medford,
Massachusetts, in 1912, when Ralph was entering his teens. "I tried
as hard as I could to be a city boy, but I didn't have very good
luck," he says at the beginning of The Fields of Home. "Just little
things that would have been all right in Colorado were always
getting me in trouble." So he is sent to his grandfather's farm in
Maine, where he finds a new set of adventures. Purchase the audio
edition.
Ralph Moody was eight years old in 1906 when his family moved from
New Hampshire to a Colorado ranch. Through his eyes we experience
the pleasures and perils of ranching there early in the twentieth
century. Auctions and roundups, family picnics, irrigation wars,
tornadoes and wind storms give authentic color to Little Britches.
So do adventures, wonderfully told, that equip Ralph to take his
father's place when it becomes necessary. Little Britches was the
literary debut of Ralph Moody, who wrote about the adventures of
his family in eight glorious books, all available as Bison Books.
Purchase the audio edition.
Horse of a Different Color ends the "roving days" of young Ralph
Moody. His saga began on a Colorado ranch in Little Britches and
continued at points east and west in Man of the Family, The Fields
of Home, The Home Ranch, Mary Emma & Company, Shaking the
Nickel Bush, and The Dry Divide. All have been reprinted as Bison
Books. Purchase the audio edition.
Fortified with Yankee ingenuity and western can-do energy, the
Moody family, transplanted from New England, builds a new life on a
Colorado ranch early in the twentieth century. Father has died and
Little Britches shoulders the responsibilities of a man at age
eleven. Man of the Family continues true pioneering adventures as
unforgettable as those in Little Britches and The Fields of Home,
also available as Bison Books. Purchase the audio edition.
Little Britches becomes the "man" in his family after his father's
early death, taking on the concomitant responsibilities as well as
opportunities. During the summer of his twelfth year he works on a
cattle ranch in the shadow of Pike's Peak, earning a dollar a day.
Little Britches is tested against seasoned cowboys on the range and
in the corral. He drives cattle through a dust storm, eats his
weight in flapjacks, and falls in love with a blue outlaw horse.
Following Little Britches and developing an episode noted near the
end of Man of the Family, The Home Ranch continues the adventures
of young Ralph Moody. Soon after returning from the ranch, he and
his mother and siblings will go east for a new start, described in
Mary Emma & Company and The Fields of Home. All these titles
have been reprinted as Bison Books. Purchase the audio edition.
The protagonist, Mary Emma Moody, widowed mother of six, has taken
her family east in 1912 to begin a new life. Her son, Ralph, then
thirteen, recalls how the Moodys survive that first bleak winter in
a Massachusetts town. Money and prospects are lacking, but not so
faith and resourcefulness. "Mother" in Little Britches and Man of
the Family, Mary Emma emerges fully as a character in this book,
and Ralph, no longer called "Little Britches," comes into his own.
The family's run-ins with authority and with broken furnaces in
winter are evocative of a full and warm family life. Mary Emma
& Company continues the Moody saga that started in Colorado
with Little Britches and runs through Man of the Family and The
Home Ranch. All these titles have been reprinted as Bison Books, as
has The Fields of Home, in which Ralph leaves the Massachusetts
town for his grandfather's farm in Maine. Purchase the audio
edition.
In 1826 an undersized sixteen-year-old apprentice ran away from a
saddle maker in Franklin, Missouri, to join one of the first wagon
trains crossing the prairie on the Santa Fe Trail. Kit Carson
(1809-68) wanted to be a mountain man, and he spent his next
sixteen years learning the paths of the West, the ways of its
Native inhabitants, and the habits of the beaver, becoming the most
successful and respected fur trapper of his time. From 1842 to 1848
he guided John C. Fremont's mapping expeditions through the Rockies
and was instrumental in the U.S. military conquest of California
during the Mexican War. In 1853 he was appointed Indian agent at
Taos, and later he helped negotiate treaties with the Apaches,
Kiowas, Comanches, Arapahos, Cheyennes, and Utes that finally
brought peace to the southwestern frontier. Ralph Moody's biography
of Kit Carson, appropriate for readers young and old, is a
testament to the judgment and loyalty of the man who had perhaps
more influence than any other on the history and development of the
American West.
Horses came to America from Spain, England, the Low Countries, and
Arabia. Here they interbred and flourished as never before. "Out of
the melting pot have come four entirely new breeds that rank among
the finest horses of the world. Three of them originated through
the painstaking and intelligent efforts of American horsemen, one
through a freak of nature." That "freak" was a little bay stallion
born when George Washington was president. This chunky,
short-legged horse proved to be not only hardy and gentle but also
able to outpull and outrun any other horse in New England or New
York. Plagued by his owners' bad luck, the horse spent most of his
twenty-eight years hauling freight but sired many offspring who
also showed the strength, endurance, speed, heart, and peculiar
conformation of the original Morgan horse. Based on extensive and
careful research, this book tells the stories of the origins of the
Morgan, the Standardbred, the American Saddle Horse, and the
Tennessee Walking Horse as well as their progenitors--Figure,
Messenger, Hamiltonian, Black Hawk, Dutchman, Lady Suffolk,
Cockspur, Denmark, Tom Hal, Copperbottom, and Roan Allen--and the
breeders and fanciers who recognized their special qualities.
Prior to the Civil War, the fastest mail between the West Coast and
the East took almost thirty days by stagecoach along a southern
route through Texas. Some Californians feared their state would not
remain in the Union, separated so far from the free states. Then
businessman William Russell invested in a way to deliver mail
between San Francisco and the farthest western railroad, in Saint
Joseph, Missouri--across two thousand miles of mountains, deserts,
and plains--guaranteed in ten days or less. Russell hired eighty of
the best and bravest riders, bought four hundred of the fastest and
hardiest horses, and built relay stations along a central
route--through modern-day Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming,
Utah, and Nevada, to California. Informed by his intimate knowledge
of horses and Western geography, Ralph Moody's exciting account of
the eighteen critical months that the Pony Express operated between
April 1860 and October 1861 pays tribute to the true grit and
determination of the riders and horses of the Pony Express.
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Stagecoach West (Paperback)
Ralph Moody; Introduction by Mark L. Gardner
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R671
R564
Discovery Miles 5 640
Save R107 (16%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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"Stagecoach West" is a comprehensive history of stagecoaching west
of the Missouri. Starting with the evolution of overland passenger
transportation, Moody moves on to paint a lively and informative
picture of western stagecoaching, from its early short runs through
its rise with the gold rush, its zenith of 1858-68, and beyond. Its
story is one of grand rivalries, political chicanery, and gaudy
publicity stunts, traders, fortune hunters, outlaws, courageous
drivers, and indefatigable detectives. We meet colorful characters
such as Charlie Parkhurst, a stagecoach driver who took an amazing
secret to his death: "he" was actually a woman. Using contemporary
accounts, illustrations, maps, and photographs to flesh out his
narrative, Moody creates one of the most important accounts of
transportation history to date.
Henry Wells (1805-78) and William Fargo (1818-81) first worked
together when they broke the Post Office monopoly on mail service
along the Erie Canal in the 1840s. In 1852 they incorporated Wells,
Fargo & Company and went into the express business in
California, carrying gold, letters, packages, and freight between
the mining regions and the financial centers of the East. They
registered the miners to receive deliveries, guarded the gold-dust
shipments, apprehended stage robbers, recovered stolen gold and
silver, and established a reliable, conservative banking house in
the world's wickedest city, San Francisco. They survived the
collapse of the mining industry, the great California panic of
1855, the depredations of bandits such as Rattlesnake Dick and
Black Bart, the dominance of the railroads, and the San Francisco
earthquake and fire. Acclaimed Western writer Ralph Moody tells the
exciting story of Henry Wells and his drivers, messengers, and
riders; his accountants, managers, and detectives; and how they
built a lasting empire in a business most entrepreneurs thought too
risky to try. Moody, author of more than a dozen books on Western
subjects, gives an action-packed account that readers young and old
will enjoy.
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