Ranger's Law brings together the fourth, fifth, and sixth of Elmer Kelton's novels on the formative years of the Texas Rangers. Kelton's young heroes, Rusty Shannon, and one-time Comanche captive, Andy Pickard, fight Indians, outlaws, feuding ranchers, smugglers, and all manner of lawbreakers...  more

Ranger's Law brings together the fourth, fifth, and sixth of Elmer Kelton's novels on the formative years of the Texas Rangers. Kelton's young heroes, Rusty Shannon, and one-time Comanche captive, Andy Pickard, fight Indians, outlaws, feuding ranchers, smugglers, and all manner of lawbreakers while trying to make lives for themselves in the tumult of post-Civil War Texas. In Ranger’s Trail it is 1874 and retired Texas Ranger Rusty Shannon is urged to rejoin the force to assist in protecting settlers from Indian raids and outlaw bands. After the girl he loves dies, Rusty goes on a vengeance trail, determined to find and kill the man who has ruined his life. But the trail Rusty is following may lead him to an innocent man.Texas Vendetta takes the young ranger Andy Pickard into the midst of a hate-filled and bloody post-Civil War feud between two Texas families. Pickard, who survived a childhood as a Comanche captive called "Badger Boy," also becomes involved with the young son of an outlaw, a boy who has been "adopted" by the rangers at their San Saba River camp, earning his way as a cook’s helper. The boy’s father, now released from prison, comes to take his son back, and into a life on the run.In Jericho’s Road, Andy Pickard is assigned to the Texas-Mexico border and finds an ominous notice on the edge of a great tract of ranch land above the Rio Grande: "This is Jericho’s Road. Take the Other." The sign signifies Jericho Jackson’s land and Jackson is at war with a similarly ruthless cattle baron on the Mexican side of the river, Guadalupe Chavez. The two rustle each others’ cattle, raiding and killing on both sides of the border, heading for a bloody showdown -- with the Texas Rangers standing between them.

West Texas hasn't changed much in the nearly seventy years Wes Hendrix has been a cowboy.. It's a hard land, a land that gives only as much as a man's willing to put into it. And Wes has always put everything he's had into it--he has no other way. Now they want to take his land away, and he is...  more

West Texas hasn't changed much in the nearly seventy years Wes Hendrix has been a cowboy.. It's a hard land, a land that gives only as much as a man's willing to put into it. And Wes has always put everything he's had into it--he has no other way. Now they want to take his land away, and he is set for the biggest fight of his life.

Johnny Fristo and Speck Quitman, young, hard-working cowboys from Fort Concho, Texas, have worked six months -- at $20 a month -- on the Devil's River. Their boss, a hawk-faced cow trader named Larramore, reneges on the money he owes the boys and sneaks out of the cow camp and heads for San...  more

Johnny Fristo and Speck Quitman, young, hard-working cowboys from Fort Concho, Texas, have worked six months -- at $20 a month -- on the Devil's River. Their boss, a hawk-faced cow trader named Larramore, reneges on the money he owes the boys and sneaks out of the cow camp and heads for San Angelo. Fristo is tall and thin, his mind a hundred miles away; Quitman is short, bandy-legged, and "bedazzled by the flash of cards and the slosh of whiskey." The two are as different as sun and moon but are inseparable, and now they have a mission: find Larramore and extract the money he owes them.

Twenty years ago, in The Good Old Boys, Elmer Kelton introduced one of the most beloved characters in Western fiction, the Texas cowboy Hewey Calloway.Hewey returns in The Smiling Country. It is now 1910 and his freewheeling life is coming to an end--the fences, trucks, and automobiles he hates...  more

Twenty years ago, in The Good Old Boys, Elmer Kelton introduced one of the most beloved characters in Western fiction, the Texas cowboy Hewey Calloway.Hewey returns in The Smiling Country. It is now 1910 and his freewheeling life is coming to an end--the fences, trucks, and automobiles he hates are creeping in even to remote Alpine, in the "smiling country" of West Texas. When he is badly injured trying to break a renegade horse, he thinks for the first time of his future and sees the loneliness that awaits him, and regrets his decision to run away from the only woman he had ever loved, the schoolteacher Spring Renfro.The Smiling Country is filled with humor, love, and the lore of the cowboy life at a time when the great, free, open ranges of the West were adjusting to a new, technological era. It is destined to stand, as so many Kelton books have, among the great Western novels of all time.

In Stand Proud, one of his most controversial novels, legendary Western writer Elmer Kelton takes on a character who is not as easy to like as he is to admire. Frank Claymore is cantankerous, stubborn, and intolerant--just the qualities that make him a success as an open-range cattle rancher on...  more

In Stand Proud, one of his most controversial novels, legendary Western writer Elmer Kelton takes on a character who is not as easy to like as he is to admire. Frank Claymore is cantankerous, stubborn, and intolerant--just the qualities that make him a success as an open-range cattle rancher on the West Texas frontier. Stand Proud follows Claymore form the time of the Civil War to the dawn of the twentieth century--through marriage, births, deaths, and a creeping change in the society that once hailed him as a hero, and which later has him condemned as a despoiler and tried for murder. Based in part of legendary rancher Charles Goodnight, Claymore is only one example of the many men who dreamed of cattle, and through their dedication to that dream came to change the face of Western history.

Irishman Doug Monahan runs a fencing crew outside the south Texas town of Twin Wells, digging post-holes and stringing red painted barbed wire for ranchers as protection against wandering stock, rustlers, and land hungry thugs.Monahan’s fencing operation is opposed by Captain Andrew...  more

Irishman Doug Monahan runs a fencing crew outside the south Texas town of Twin Wells, digging post-holes and stringing red painted barbed wire for ranchers as protection against wandering stock, rustlers, and land hungry thugs.Monahan’s fencing operation is opposed by Captain Andrew Rinehart, a former Confederate officer and an old-school open range baron of the huge R Cross spread. With his brutal foreman, Archer Spann, assigned to the violent work, Rinehart wages a barbed wire war against Doug Monahan. And neither side takes prisoners!

One of America's greatest Western storytellers, Elmer Kelton has been voted the greatest Western writers of all time by the Western Writers of America. Dark Thicket is one of his many classic tales of the history of his home state of Texas.Young Owen Danforth rides home to Texas as a wounded...  more

One of America's greatest Western storytellers, Elmer Kelton has been voted the greatest Western writers of all time by the Western Writers of America. Dark Thicket is one of his many classic tales of the history of his home state of Texas.Young Owen Danforth rides home to Texas as a wounded Confederate soldier, at a time when his home state is as savagely divided as his nation. As a grievously wounded America staggers toward the inevitable end of the Civil War, secessionist "home guards" and staunch Union loyalists fight their own bloody battles on a more local scale. For Owen, sick to death of fighting and yearning for peace and recuperation, his homecoming is bittersweet. And when his blood ties force him to choose a side in an unwinnable conflict, Owen begins to wonder if he will ever see peace in Texas again.

"The Far Canyon", the sequel to "Slaughter" was published in 1994 and won Elmer Kelton his sixth esteemed Spur Award from the Western Writers of America. By 2002 Kelton had not only earned his seventh Spur Award with Way of the Coyote, but had also won three Western Heritage Awards. The National...  more

"The Far Canyon", the sequel to "Slaughter" was published in 1994 and won Elmer Kelton his sixth esteemed Spur Award from the Western Writers of America. By 2002 Kelton had not only earned his seventh Spur Award with Way of the Coyote, but had also won three Western Heritage Awards. The National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum honored Kelton for "The Time it Never Rained" in 1974, "The Good Old Boys" in 1979, and "The Man Who Rode Midnight" in 1988. With such accomplishments, it is easy to understand why, in 1995, the Western Writers of America voted Elmer Kelton the greatest western writer of all time. In "The Far Canyon", Kelton masterfully unveils for his reader the finality of the buffalo's demise, the beginning of a time when cattle would replace the American bison on the southern plains and ultimately end the Plains Indian culture. The novel reveals the history of the period, not in a general grand swoop of the pen, but rather, up close and personal, so his readership can judge the impact of the period upon his characters. The novel's first chapter introduces Comanche warrior Crow Feather, whose situation is emblematic of a common recurring theme in all of Kelton's works...change. Protagonist Jeff Layne is faced with the very same dramatic problem, the devastating threat to one's self-concept inherent in change. Layne, the hide hunter from Slaughter is weary of killing and death. He decides to return to South Texas, determined to earn his living with the newest resource on the plains, cattle. And the cultures collide. Kelton eloquently reveals the impact of hide hunters on Plains Indian culture. Crow Feather realizes that no matter how many whites the Comanche kill, there will always be more 'coming back'. Crow Feather also understands that his life and the lives of his wives and children will never be easy again. Are Layne and Crow Feather of a character that will allow them to escape a predetermined fate by reaching that far canyon, or will they simply perish under the cultural dictate of their historical time?