Showing results for "patrick dearen"

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...

Rising at 11,750 feet in the Sangre de Cristo range and snaking 926 miles through New Mexico and Texas to the Rio Grande, the Pecos River is one of the most storied waterways in the American West. It is also one of the most troubled. In 1942, the National Resources Planning Board observed that the Pecos River basin “probably presents a greater aggregation of problems associated with land and water use than any other irrigated basin in the Western U.S.” In the twenty-first century, the rive...

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 ...

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...

Spur Award-Winning Author* ELMER KELTON AWARD FOR FICTION, ACADEMY OF WESTERN ARTISTS* WILL ROGERS BRONZE MEDALLION AWARD FOR WESTERN FICTION* FINALIST, PEACEMAKER AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL, WESTERN FICTIONEERSClay Andrews is like a dead man, adrift in an uncaring dark. But he's also searching, and in 1869 he has ridden to the Pecos River to find answers.Back in Central Texas, Clay's sister has died, and only on this river might he learn why. The person p...

2023 FINALIST, PEACEMAKER AWARD OF WESTERN FICTIONEERS2023 FINALIST, WILL ROGERS MEDALLION AWARDIt's 1917, and the Mexican Revolution has the Big Bend of Texas aflame. But the firestorm is no greater than the one inside newspaper reporter Jack Landon. Disillusioned, he flees down the road to nowhere and finds himself in Esperanza. Populated by people of Mexican heritage, the small village on the Texas bank of the Rio Grande is a target of Texas Rangers Company B, which unju...

Tom Rowden has been riding away from the Pecos River for twenty years, plagued by the haunting image of his wife, Sarah, the second before he killed her. Now, he is dead-set on returning to her unmarked grave above the river to make one final atonement. His journey is interrupted when a group of Mexican bandits burn down the 7L’s ranch house, kill the ranch boss, and rape and abduct his daughter, Liz Anne. The 7L’s greenhorn wagon boss, Jess Graham, desperately begs for Tom’s help in rescu...

First published in 1988, Castle Gap and the Pecos Frontier was acclaimed by reviewers as “superb,” “significant,” and “utterly delightful.” In this revised edition, Patrick Dearen draws upon the latest in scholarship to update his study of the Pecos River country of West Texas. It’s a land wild with tales that blend history, geography, and folklore, and from his search emerge six fascinating accounts:-Castle Gap, a break in a mesa twelve miles east of the Pecos River, used ...

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...

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...

Spur Award-Winning AuthorWINNER OF THE ELMER KELTON AWARDFor nineteen years, Wash Baker has been haunted by firing into the night at what he thought was a grizzly, only to kill his young son and narrowly miss a second boy, Trey. Now, in 1899, confirmed tracks of grizzly—a species of bear unknown in Texas—have been found at a Davis Mountains camp meeting attended by Wash and his daughter, Grace.The congregants include Trey, now an adult and courting Grace, and Trey's...