Fourteen-year-old Josh and his friend Shan are facing hard times on their families' farms in Central Texas in 1934. It's the days of the Dust Bowl and Great Depression, and rain is as scarce as money. With the long dry spell have come wild animals with flashing teeth and deadly rabies. Dust storms known as black blizzards are raging, threatening lives and destroying cropland. Will a rainmaker bring rain? Will their families lose their homes? Will Josh's and Shan's friendship survive? From ...

Spur Award-Winning Author2019 Elmer Kelton Award WinnerEight months have passed since Sam DeJarnett lost his wife and unborn child to Mescalero Apaches, and now he is one of ten Texas Rangers pursuing those very hostiles in 1881. He lives only for vengeance, and the fresh Mescalero trail in the snow is leading straight into the bitterly cold Sierra Diablo of Texas.In the Mescalero band is Nejeunee, a twenty-year-old woman with a baby. She has lost her husband to the...

It’s Halloween in 1860, wolves are howling, and bats are flying across the face of the moon. Eleven-year-old Bird and his twin brother are on a Butterfield stage headed across the Red River into Texas. Even though their father is the driver, the next several miles will be scary. Night has fallen, and the dark woods may be full of spooks, ghost bells, glowing tombstones, headless horsemen, wandering spirits, and forked-tail terrors.When the brothers meet up with Zeb, an enslaved boy...

In this standalone sequel to The Big Drift—winner of five awards including the Spur Award of Western Writers of America—Patrick Dearen explores race relations against the backdrop of the Big Dry, a devastating drought in the 1880s in Texas. Zeke Boles, a black cowhand, awaits hanging in North Texas for a murder he didn’t commit. His white friend Will Brite, with whom he rode in the Big Drift blizzard, has exhausted virtually all avenues to get Zeke exonerated. Will’s only hope is ...

The Big Bend of Texas is a mysterious place in 1869. Legend has it that there's a lost gold mine in the Chisos Mountains. Twelve-year-old Fish Rawlings and his cousin Gid have heard all about it. But when they discover a dying Indian in the desert, they have reason to believe it.Suddenly the boys find themselves with a great secret. No one else knows the way to the last Chisos mines-but do they dare? To find it, they must cross a desert prowled by Apache warriors. They must ride a ...

It's 1867 and eleven-year-old Fish Rawlings and his cousin are headed across Texas on a wagon train. But the trail is full of danger. A Comanche war party is on the prowl, looking for horses and scalps. Among the Indians is eleven year old Hunting Bear, who is riding his first war trail. Before the journey is over, he must prove himself worthy to be a warrior.Fish has been taught to hate Comanches. Hunting Bear has been taught to hate white men. But all of that changes when the two...

Eleven-year-old Fish Rawlings has always wanted to be a cowboy. Now, in the spring of 1868, he has his chance. His uncle is driving a cattle herd across Texas, and Fish is going with him as far as Horsehead Crossing on the Pecos River. Little does Fish know that he is saddling up for the wildest rides of his life.With his cousin Gid, Fish is about to face mean broncs, angry longhorns, and a dozen cowboys ready to play pranks. The days ahead will be filled with sandstorms and stampe...

A man either chases his dreams, or he dies. Present-day ranch hand Charlie Lyles longs for an era before mechanization, when a cowboy's greatest ally was his horse. He remembers stories of cattle drives and stampedes and shallow graves in lonesome country. Society has pushed Charlie toward a conformity that he hates, but he is about to change the rules. At a remote line shack in West Texas, he steals a horse, leaving a perfectly good pickup behind. His theft leads to a manhunt with a helic...

It was 1932, the depths of the Great Depression, and thousands of desperate people rode the rails in search of jobs, homes, and hope. For some, the tracks were a road to nowhere, a dead end in a boxcar or under the wheels or in a sea of emptiness. Their fate seemed certain-until Ish Watson grabbed the rungs of a passing freight train bound for a dying relative on the Texas Gulf Coast.He brought with him the traits bestowed by his rural upbringing‑faith, conviction and dedication. B...

Every time a cowhand dug his boot into the stirrup, he knew that this ride could carry him to trail's end. In real stories told by genuine cowboys, this book captures the everyday perils of the "flinty hoofs and devil horns of an outlaw steer, the crush of a half-ton of fury in the guise of a saddle horse, the snap of a rope pulled taut enough to sever digits. Threats took many forms, all of them sudden, most inescapable—a whooshing arrow or exploding slug, a raging river ready to drag him...

From true cowhands who stood tall in the saddle as the prototypes of the American myth, historian Patrick Dearen has collected priceless, spellbinding stories of a simpler era when a man's word was his bond and a cowhand rode hard and lived harder. Within the pages of this book these genuine legends who rode through a golden moment in American history live on.

2022 Elmer Kelton Award WinnerSpur Award-Winning AuthorPatrick Dearen"Fast-paced, gripping, and exciting . . .An unusual but interesting concept for a western story."—Historical Novel Society.In 1870, Jake Graves faced a choice: allow Comanches to carry off his sister, or shoot her. Unwilling to fire, he has been tortured for decades by the brutal end that he could have spared her. The incident bred in him a hatred for Indians that persists to this d...