Streets of Laredo
By Larry McMurtry

589 pages
Simon & Schuster 1993
Condition…Excellent

From the dust jacket…

Streets of Loredo is Larry McMurtry’s long awaited sequel to Lonesome Dove.

At the center of the novel is Captain Call, Augustus McCrae’s old partner now a bounty hunter hired to track down and kill the brilliant and elusive young Mexican bandit Joey Garza. In the chase that ensues, an old man’s skills are matched against a young man’s daring.

Call’s long hunt takes him into the Texas panhandle, across the Pecos, and into Northern Mexico. In pursuing Joey Garza, and the psychopathic manburner Mox Mox, call traverses one of the last untamed and unsettled stretches of the American West.

Call takes with him an Eastern dude; an incompetent deputy; and his old corporal, Pea Eye Parker, now married to Lorenaonce in love with Gus McCrae.

In Mexico he meets Maria, Joey Garza’s mother, the gallant Mexican woman who struggles to save her son, both from Captain Call and from himself. As the chase progresses we meet such true-life Westerners as John Wesley Hardin, Judge Roy Bean and the great cattleman Charles Goodnight.

The struggle that animates this novel is not merely between an old man and a young man; it is also a struggle between civilization and barbarism. Lorena Parker journeys into the barren lands in midwinter to rescue her husband and bring him back to their decent life; Maria Garza rides to Crow Town, a community of casual killers, in order to save her son.

In the final, terrible conflict, Pea Eye’s loyalty to his family and the devotion of the two women to husband and son hold a candle up to civilization for values that go beyond an ability to kill, and in doing so offer a hope for the West that is to be.

Ronicky Doone
By Max Brand

247 pages
Discarded Library Book
Chelsea House 1993
Large Print
Condition…Excellent

From the dust jacket…

In and around the town of Stillwater, in the mountain desert country of the West, Ronicky Doone made his living as a gamblerone who had a reputation as a champion of lost causes. But one of the most memorable adventures was that on which he embarked with Bill Greg, which took the two Westerners to New York where Ronicky’s gambling skills were pitted against that of the master sharpers of the metropolis.

The Romantics
By Peter Brandvold

350 pages
Forge Book 2001
Condition…Excellent

From the dust jacket…

The daughter of a Hispanic landowner, Marina Clark has been given a map that purports to lead the way to a hidden cache of Spanish gold. To her husband, this map is the key to restoring the families fortune and honor, both lost during the Civil War. Though he won his wife in a poker game, Adrian Clark is fiercely possessive of her, dreaming of the day he will stride through his hometown with this dusky beauty on his arm. Marina does not love Arrian, but is bound to him by her pride and his promise that once he has the gold, she may use some to ransome her illegimate daughter from a religious order.

The Clarks’ guide through sun- and sand-blasted lands is Jack Cameron, a deadly shot who has won fame as an Indian scout. He’d originally set out to capture Perro Loco, an Apache worrior, and claim U.S. Army gold as a reward, but the pursuit ended with the indian’s body at the bottom of a steep-sided ravine and no money for Cameron. Unable to pay his men or the people of his home valley who are depending on the reward money, he agrees to guide the Clarks on their quest, even though he firmly believes there is no gold at the place marked on the map.

It should be a simple matter of avoiding marauding Apaches and Mexican rurales, but Cameron swiftly falls in love with the beautiful Marina. Wary of Clark’s jealousy and uneasy in love, Cameron fights his feelings even when he understands that Marina loves him too.

Additional complications arise in the person of Gaston Bachelard, a former Confererate army officer turned bandit, and his partner, a Mexican revolutionary. Having heard of the map to the lost gold, Bachelard and his men are hot on the Clarks’ trail.

The Haunted Mesa
By Louis L’amour

355 pages
Bantam Books 1987
Condition…Good (some dust jacket wear)

From the dust jacket…

The Haunted Mesa  begins near a mesa so forbidding neither indian nor white man chooses to live in it’s shadow. Summoned to the dark desert plateau by the desperate letter of an old friend, internationally renouned investigator of unexplained phenomena Mike Raglan finds himself slowly drawn into a world beyond the laws of man and nature, and learns the astonishing legacy of the Anasazi.

Heart of the West
By Penelope Williamson

591 pages
Simon & Schuster 1995
Condition…Excellent

From the dust jacket…

All her life, Clementine Kennicutt has been filled with restless longing. A ladylike New Englander, she yearns to escape the chafing authoritarian rule of her pios, unforgiving father. Clementine has never met anyone remotely like Gus McQueen. So when the cowboy with the laughing eyes and big urgent dreams presses her to elope with him to his Montana ranch, she is ready.

But nothing has prepared her for the harsh realities of frontier life or for the unpredictable hankering of the heartleast of all for the fact that almost from the first moment she sets eyes on Zach, Gus’s dashing ne’er-do-well brother, she knows he’s the one she was destined to love. Possessed of a rare spirit and courage, Clementine becomes friends with Erlan, a young Chinese mail-order bride, and with Hannah, the local dance-hall owner, and champions of proud, embittered half-breed cattle rustler and his young Indian wife against an angry community that wants to hang him.

The Holy Road
By Michael Blake

339 pages
Villard Books 2001
Condition…Excellent


From the dust jacket…

The continuing saga of Dances With Wolves.

Eleven years have passed since Lieutenant John Dunbar became the Comanche warrior Dances With Wolves and married Stands With A Fist, a white-born woman raised as a Comanche from early childhood. With their three children, they live peacefully in the village of Ten Bears. But there is unease in the air, caused by increased reports of violent confrontations with white soldiers, who want to drive the Comanche onto reservations-a movement symbolized by the railroad, the white man’s holy road. Disquiet turns to horror, and then to rage, when a band of white rangers descends on Ten Bears’ village, slaughtering half its inhabitants and abducting Stands With A Fist and her infant daughter. The three surviving great warriorsWind In His Hair, Kicking Bird and Dances With WolvesDecide they must go to war with the white invaders. At the same time, Dances With Wolves realizes that only he can move unnoticed among the white men to rescue his wife and child.

Pioneer Women
Voices from the Kansas Frontier
By Joanna L. Stratton

267 pages
Simon & Schuster 1981
Condition… Good (the dust jacket is worn)

From the dust jacket…

In the winter of 1975, Joanna Stratton made a remarkable discovery. In the attic of her grandmothers home in Kansas. Buried among old toys, trunks and fading antiques, was a set of priceless autobiographical manuscripts written by hundreds of pioneer women. The memoirs had been commissioned and collected by Ms. Stratton’s great-grandmother, Lilla Day Monroe, a prominent nineteenth-century suffragist, lawyer and publisher, who intended to edit them into a book. Now, three generations later, Ms. Stratton has rescued these extraordinary accounts from obscurity to finish her great-grandmothers project…

Replete with drama, here are stories of wilderness mothers, schoolmarms, Indian squaws, immigrants, homesteaders and circuit riders. Their personal recollections of prairie fires, locust plagues, cowboy shoot-outs, Indian raids and blizzards on the plains portray vividly the dangers and excitement of pioneering…

A Sudden Country
By Karen Fisher

363 pages
Random House 2005
Condition…Excellent

From the dust jacket…

A vivid and revolutionary novel based on actual events of the 1847 Oregon migration, A Sudden Country follows two characters of remarkable complexity and strength in a journey of survival and redemption.

James MacLaren once a resourceful and ambitious Hudson’s Bay Company trader, has renounced his aspirations for a quiet family life in the bitterroot wilderness. Yet his life is overturned in the winter of 1864, when his Nez Perce wife deserts him and his children die of smallpox. In the grip of a profound sorrow, MacLaren, whose home once spanned a continent, sets out to find his wife, but an act of secret vengeance changes his course, introducing him to a different wife and mother: Lucy Mitchell, journeying westward with her family. Lucy, a remarried widow, careful mother, and reluctant immigrant, is drawn at once to the self-possessed MacLaren. Convinced that he is the key to her families safe passage, she persuades her husband to employ him. As their hidden stories and obsessions unfold, and pasts and cultures collide, both Lucy and MacLaren must confront the people they have truly been, are, and may become.

Dead Man’s Walk
By Larry McMurtry

477 pages
Simon & Schuster 1995
Condition…Excellent

From the dust jacket…

Here at last is the eagerly awaited story of the early days of GusMcCrae and Woodrow Call, the heroes of Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prizewinning novel, Lonesome Dove.

In Streets of Laredo, McMurtry brought the story ahead, giving us Call in his old age; now, in Dead Man’s Walk, he takes the reader back, to the days when Gus and Calltwo of the most beloved figures in American fictionwere young Texas Rangers, first experiencing the wild frontier that will form their characters. We also meet Clara Forsythe, the spirited, unforgettable young woman whose effect on Gus McCrae is immediate and unshakable. Danger, sacrifice, and fear test these two young men to the limits of endurance, friendship, comradeship, and love give them the strength and courage to survive against almost insurmountable odds in the West of the early nineteenth century.

In Dead Man’s Walk, Gus and Call are not yet twenty, young men coming of age in the days when Texas was still an independent republic. Enlisting as Texas Rangers under the command of Caleb Cobb, a capricious land pirate who wants to sieze Santa Fe from the Mexicans, Gus and Call experience their first great adventure in the barren, empty landscape of the great plains, in which arbitrary violence is the rulewhether from nature or from the Indians whose territory they must cross in order to reach New Mexico…

Buffalo Girls
By Larry McMurtry

Simon & Schuster 1990
346 pages
Condition… Excellent
Small scratch on the dust jacket

From the dust jacket…

Larry McMurtry writes of the life of Calamity Jane, a woman whose past embraces the whole short, violent, passionate history of the West, from the mountain men who first made their way into Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas in search of beaver pelts, to the buffalo hunters who destroyed the great herds, to the gunfighters like Wild Bill Hickok (perhaps the love of Calamity Jane’s life), to the Indians and soldiers who fought the final battle that made the West no longer “wild.”

Calamity Jane is the Westa larger-than-life figure, living in her friend Dora’s  whorehouse in Miles City, apparently content to remember the excitements of the past (and reinvent them in letters to her daughter) until the arrival of her old friend and rival, Buffalo Bill Cody, plunges her into her last, bittersweet adventure as a member of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Showwhich includes the great Indian hero of the Little Big Horn, Sitting Bull; two old mountain men, Bartle and Jim; an ancient Indian scout, No Ears; and Calamity Jane herselfto reinact in Europe the great drama of the American West.

Last of the Breed
By Louis L’Amour

Bantam 1986
372 pages
Condition…Excellent

From the dust jacket…

The hero of last of the breed is one of L’Amours most memorable characters: U. S.  Air Force Major Joseph “Joe Mack” Makatozi, part Souix, part Cheyenne, a near-olympic caliber athlete who is as proud of the long-nurtured legacy of his Indian ancestors as he is of his place in the white man’s world. After his experimental aircraft is forced down over the Bering Sea by Russians starved for military secrets, Joe Mack soon makes a spectacular escape from a secluded Soviet prison camp. He flees into the vast wilderness of Siberia-a prison with walls of ice-where his pursuers expect him to perish.

But Makatozi is a true Indian born out of his time. Without food, shelter, clothing, weapon or ally. He is at last free to shed his twentieth century sensibility and summon up the noble calling of his Sioux warrior forebears. To survive he must call upon the ancient skills he learned as a boy: to hunt game with only hand carved weapons, to make moccasins and outer garments from animal skins and to find shelter in a barren landscape. Most of all, he must continue to be invisible to the relentless pursuit of the agents and soldiers under the direction of Colonel Zamatev, the ruthlessly efficient GRU officer whose career rests on recapturing the escaped American. But Joe Mack is not always a man alone. He is befriended by a band of exiles in a nearly forsaken outpost and drawn to their leaders beautiful daughter, Natalya, whose spirit and yearning for liberty matches his own. Yet even in those rare moments of comfort and safety, it is the Yakut native Alekhin, his Siberian counterpart, whom Joe fears most. A legendary tracker who knows every natural and manmade hiding place on the Siberian frontier, Alekhin understands that to trap his quarry he must think like a Souix.

Only one route lies open to Joe Mack to retrace the path of his ancestors to America overland through Siberia and across the Bering strait. But first he must avenge the honor of his people and his country-face to face, man to man.

Killing Custer
By James Welch

296 pages
W.W. Norton & Company 1994
Condition…Excellent

From the dust jacket…

General George Custer’s Ill-fated attack on a huge encampment of Plains Indians on June 25, 1876, has gone down as the most disastrous defeat in American military history. Much less understood is how disastrous the encounter was for the “victors,” the Sioux and Cheyenne under the leadership of Sitting Bull. Within fifteen years no American Indians resided outside of reservations and their culture lay in ruins.

Killing Custer is a nonfiction work, a poignant and highly personal resurrection of the Indian side of the story from beneath a mountain of myth and misinterpretation.

James Welch bestows humanity and tragic stature to a people once thought fit only for exploitation and extermination. Killing Custer restores a critical missing piece of the American mosaic and rethinks the meaning of the Little Bighorn for a multicultural society.

Lone Creek
By Neil McMahon

326 pages
HarperCollins 2007
Condition…Excellent

From the dust jacket…

After a failed career and marriage in California, Hugh Davoren is back in Helena, Montana, as a construction hand at the old Pettyjohn Ranch, home of many childhood memoriesincluding the seemingly accidental death of his teenage first love, Celia.

Hugh is just trying to get through another long workday on the ranch when he discovers two dead stallions. A further probe into the matter only pushes Hugh into dangerous corners, as he finds that the ranch’s slick new owner, his beautiful wife, and even old Mr. Pettyjohn have terrible secrets to keep.

Elmer McCurdy,
The misadventures in life and
afterlife of an American outlaw
By Mark Svenvold

279 pages
Basic Books 2002
Condition…Excellent

From the dust jacket…

In life Elmer McCurdy was a plumber-cum-miner who jumped a train and drifted west across America on the back of an infectious, turn-of-the-century optimism. He was a drunk too, and, soon enough, a failed outlaw. In 1911, after a short spree of failed robberies, he held up the wrong train and rode away with a haul that was described by papers as “one of the smallest in the history of train robbery.” It wasn’t long before a sheriff and his posse caught up with him and shot him dead.

At this point McCurdy, like us all, should have slipped into the earth and quietly from memory. But, in death he accidently found fame. From the Joseph Johnson Funeral Home, where the owner propped up McCurdy’s preserved corpse and charged a nickel-a-look, to the sideshows of the great Patterson Carnival where he was exhibited as a felled outlaw, McCurdy became big business. In 1928 he was the star attraction in a carnival that accompanied an extraordinary transcontinental running race from Los Angeles to New York. In the thirties and forties, he was reinvented as a prop for a series of Hollywood exploitation films like Dwain Esper’s film Narcotic, before winding up painted day-glo orange and hanging by his neck in the Laff in the Dark ghost tunnel in Long Beach California. It was here, in 1976, during the filming of an episode of the Six Million Dollar Man, that Elmer was rescued from his strange journey. A forgotten corpse as light as tinderwood. In his mouth the coroner discovered a green, corroded 1924 penny and a ticket stub that read “Louis Sonney’s Museum of Crime”.

The Collected Short Stories
of Louis L’Amour
The Frontier Stories, Volume 1

422 pages
Bantam Books 2003
Condition…Excellent

Contents…

The Gift of Cochise                                 Home is the Hunter
That Man from The Bitter Sands               The Defense of Sentinel
Desperate Men Dutchman’s Flat               The One For the Mohave Kid
From the Listening Hills                           A Mule for Santa Fe
Trap of Gold                                           War Party
Riches Beyond Dream                          Ironwood Station
The Lonesome Gods                                Alkali Basin
The Skull and the Arrow                          Stage to Willowspring
End of the Drive                                      Let the Cards Decide
Caprock Rancher                                    Duffy’s Man
Dead-End Drift                                     The Strong Shall Live
One Night Stand                                      To Make a Stand
Marshal of Canyon Gap                            Get Out of Town
A Husband for Janey                                One for the Pot
Elisha Comes to Red Horse                       Beyond the Chaparral
The Courting of Griselda                           Rustler Roundup
Booty for a Badman                                 The Moon of the Trees
Broken by Snow

Come Sundown
By Mike Blakely

Discarded Library Book
479 pages
Forge 2006
Condition…Excellent

From the dust jacket…

Reluctant hero Honore’ Greenwood has a knack for embroiling himself in the most violent conflicts of the Southern Plains. Known as Plenty Man to the Comanches, Honore’ serves as ransom negotiator for captives among the Indians. As if his life weren’t in danger enough, Honore’ has offered his services to the New Mexico Volunteers in the Civil War. But as Honore’’s luck would have it, He’s in the same unit as Luther Sheffield, a man whose grudge against Greenwood knows no bounds, even though they are fighting on the same side.

Leaving behind his beautiful Arapaho bride, Honore’ rides out, joining his legendary friend, Kit Carson, as a scout. But he is swept into more action than he bargained forheavy combat in the battles of Valverde Ford and Glorieta Pass, plus Indian attacksall the while watching over his shoulder for the ruthless Luther Sheffield. Worried that he may soon be ordered to take up arms against his own adoptive tribe, the Comanches, Honore’ Resigns as Kit’s scout to return to his tribe.

But Honore’’s halcyon days among the Indians cannot last forever, and he knows that eventually his old calvary unit will come to attack his village. Torn between a nation on the rise and his own adoptive culture, Plenty Man, as the comanches know him, is forced to lead the fight for his tribes freedom against his old friend, the great Kit Carson, in a battle at a remote place in the Texas panhandle called Adobe Walls. But in the end, itbecomes difficult to tell enemy from ally, and Plenty Man knows his loyalty to the Indians may cost him everythinghis beautiful wife, his freedom to return to white civilization, his friendship with Kit and even his very life.

The Last Buffalo Hunt
By Gary McCarthy

180 pages
DoubleDay 1985
Condition…Excellent

From the dust jacket…

Thomas Atherton is a young stablemaster from Massachusetts who has always dreamed of leaving Boston behind and heading West across the great frontier. Spurred by an encounter with the legendary Buffalo Bill Cody at his famous Wild West Show, Atherton decides to make his dream a reality. Extra incentive comes by way of a $5000 reward offered to the first man to find a surviving herd of the nearly extinct buffalo. And so, once and for all, Thomas Atherton sets out to test his mettle and prove his true grit on The Last Buffalo Hunt. However, He soon finds that taming horses is nothing compared to taming the prairie and the rugged mountains beyond. But Thomas’s biggest challenge by far is taming Sally, a beautiful con woman with a silver tongue and an ornery streak a mile wide, who decides Atherton is her kind of man when she hears about the $5000 reward. Together they ride out in pursuit of the magnificent thundering herdspursued themselves by a rugged assortment of outlaws, cattle rustlers and greedy government agents who’d as soon hang you from a limb as look you in the eye.

Coming upon the buffalo in a hidden mountain pass, Thomas and Sally plan their last stand: not to collect the reward, but to stop the ruthless killers who mean to hunt the beasts down and wipe them off the plains forever.

Deep in the Heart
By Gilbert Morris

391 pages
Integrity 2003
Condition…Excellent

From the dust jacket…

In the days when Texas was the Northern edge of Mexico, when Bowie and Houston and Crockett were men and not yet legends, When the Alamo was still a scruffy mission on the banks of the San Antonio River, This unorthodox family struggled to make a wild but beautiful land their own.

This is the tale of Jerusalem Ann, who is willing to take whatever life dishes out in order to make a life for her family. It’s the story of Clay, who finds himself protecting another man’s familyand in love with another man’s wife. It’s about Jake, who loves two women and can’t do right by either… and Julie, who’d rather be free than respectable…and Bowie, who can handle war but might not survive his first love. It’s the story of Comanches and fiestas, hunting parties and courting parties, of battles and massacres and beautiful calm nights under a canopy of stars.

Monument Rock
Seven short stories and one short novel
Louis L’Amour

Bantam Books 1998
264 pages
Condition…Excellent

From the dust jacket…

Monument Rock reveals a time and place of desperate violence and true courage in a wide-open country of fortune seekers and dreamers, lawbreakers and pioneers. Here a newly swarn in marshal matches wits with a cunning and mysterious killer, a man who’s made a fortune doing business with his neighbors while secretly cutting their throats. A young drifter, wounded in a gunfight, finds relief in the embrace of a woman and a chance to change his ways…but only if he’s willing to engage in one more act of violence against odds that will surely end in death.

Here, too, are stories marked by L’Amour’s unparalleled realism and suspense: a ranch foreman sets out in pursuit of cattle rustlers and discovers it only takes one man and one bullet to destroy his reputation, his family, and his faith.

A fiercely independent woman takes a desperate stand against the ruthless men about to drive her from her home. And in the short novel Monument Rock, a shadowy horseman, rumored to be a vengeful ghost, delivers a haunting message of corruption, conspiracy, and murder to a innocent young womanthe shocking truth about the two men closest to her heart. History, humor, action, and adventure all come together in this classic and inimitable style that has made Louis L’Amour the undisputed voice of the American West.

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