Elmer Kelton

When Texas Ranger private Andy Pickard is assigned to help patrol the Texas-Mexico border country he rides directly into a deadly feud. At odds are two land and cattle barons - Jericho Jackson, whose great spread lies just north of the Rio Grande, and Guadalupe Chavez, whose domain lies south of the river. The men are alike in only one respect: their hatred for each other, a hate born at the time of the Alamo and the U. S.-Mexican War, when Mexican lands were confiscated by ruthless Americans. The old rivals have turned to preying on each others' cattle with resulting bloodshed on both sides of the river. Between the two camps, Big Jim McCawley's ranch seems almost symbolic of the opportunity for the people of the two nations to live together. McCawley is married to Guadalupe Chavez's sister, Juana -a fact that does not ingratiate him to either the Chavez or Jackson faction. To Andy Pickard, who as a child was taken captive by Comanches, old prejudices are familiar territory, but the Jackson-Chavez war is flaring out of control by the time he reaches the Ranger camp on the border in the company of fellow Ranger Farley Brackett. The two Rangers find themselves caught up in the feud, risking arrest for crossing the river into Mexico, and risking death for not heeding the warning sign at the edge of Jericho Jackson's domain: This is Jericho's Road. Take the Other. Inevitably, the cauldron boils over and the forces of Jericho Jackson and "Lupe" Chavez meet in bloody combat. In the midst of this battle on Mexican soil are Andy Pickard -- longing to court and marry Bethel Brackett and live a peaceful life as an ex-Ranger -- and Brackett himself, falling in love with Teresa, Big Jim McCawley's half-Mexican daughter. Jericho's Road, sixth book in Kelton's acclaimed Texas Ranger series, typifies "The right blend of action, drama, romance, humor and suspense" that Publishers Weekly said has made Kelton "a master of both plot and character development."

In the 1870s, buffalo hunters moved onto the High Plains of Texas. The Plains Indians watched hunters slaughter the animals that gave them shelter and clothing, food and weapons. The battles at and near the ruins of a trading fort, Adobe Walls, became symbolic of the struggles between hunters and the Comanche. In this aptly titled novel, Texas novelist Elmer Kelton shows his uncanny ability to present both sides of a clash between cultures. With a firm grasp of Comanche life, Kelton presents The People as very human and very threatened. Equally clear is the picture of Anglos found on the high plains in those days - Jeff Layne, a Confederate veteran and now a fugitive; Nigel Smithwick, an English ""second son"" and gambler; Arletta, the lone woman among these men (one woman was at Adobe Walls).

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.

Ten years have passed since Michael Lewis made his first venture into Texas, now a province of Mexico. Together with a small number of Americans pioneering on the Brazos and Colorado Rivers, Michael and his brother Andrew each have a plot of land assigned to them by the entrepreneur Stephen F. Austin. Michael Lewis has his fathers' wanderlust, Andrew is less footloose and excitable but the two act as one when trouble starts. To secure their places in their new-found lands in Texas, the Lewis boys have to fight not only Mexican authorities and hostile Indians, but their own kind - renegade white men attempting to settle on Texas land without permission or authority. In "The Raiders: Sons of Texas," Elmer Kelton continues his saga of the Lewis family and the formative years of Texas, ending this mid-volume of the trilogy with the birth of Michael's daughter and the marriage of Andrew to Petra Moreno, a girl from Nacogdoches with whom he has fallen in love.

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

In the 1978 novel, ""The Good Old Boys"", Hewey Calloway is a ""fiddle-footed"" cowboy, roaming from job to job and facing an uncertain future as he grows older. His brother, Walter, married and settled down to hard-scrabble farming, wants Huey to do the same. Eve, Walter's wife, clearly disapproves of Hewey and fears his influence on her two sons, who idolize their uncle. Snort Yarnell, another cowboy, wants Hewey to join him in driving horses to Southwest Texas, work in Mexico, and live free. And then there's Spring Renfro, who loves Hewey and wants a home of her own. In the end, even for Spring, Hewey can't bring himself to abandon the free life. Actor/director Tommy Lee Jones made a memorable TV movie from the book. Twenty years later, in this sequel, Elmer Kelton brought Hewey back, older, wiser, and badly banged up trying to break a renegade bronc. His wandering days are over because of his injuries, because of fences that cut up the range, because of trucks and automobiles. But how will Hewey handle the new circumstances of his life? And how will Spring react to his return? Readers who fell in love with Hewey will delight in seeing him back and following his new and different adventures.

'A veritable Whos Who of pioneer cattlemen' - Elmer Kelton, from the Foreword. John and Mahlon Thatcher were two of the many pioneers looking to begin a new life in the great open spaces of the West. In the 1860s, the brothers began a small mercantile in the town of Pueblo, Colorado. From a safe in the corner of their new store, the brothers founded what was to become the First National Bank of Pueblo, Colorado and the beginnings of a financial empire that would encompass cattle companies from New Mexico to Canada. Together with such legendary figures as Frank Bloom, Henry Cresswell, O. H. Perry Baxter, William Anderson, Burton Mossman, and Mahlon T. Everhart, they created a cattle empire, financing and directing the Bloom Land and Cattle Company, the Diamond A Cattle Company, and the Hatchet Cattle Company. Their herds of cattle, horses, and sheep ranged on some eleven million acres of land. ""Great Plains Cattle Empire"" tells their stories, spanning the years from just after the Civil War through World War II. Paul E. Patterson managed the Diamond A Cattle Company for twenty-six years. His work has appeared in ""Field and Stream"", ""New Mexico Magazine"", ""Western Horseman"", and other publications. Joy Poole is former director of the Fort Collins Museum in Colorado.

Surrounded by the spectacular setting of the Big Bend's rugged mountains, deep canyons, and arid pasturelands, a hardy group of settlers and their descendants have forged a livelihood and a way of life. Through vivid images and interviews with these men and women at home and at work, June Redford Van Cleef and Bill Wright offer a glimpse into this remnant of Texas' corner of the Old West. Stories handed down from grandparents and great-grandparents tell of roping bears and mountain lions as well as cattle and goats, of drought years and gully washers, of homes across the Mexican border and homes built from the earth itself, of suffering and triumph, family bonds and loneliness. How they came to this remote area, why they stayed, what they hoped for - these are the human elements in a region better known for its natural elements. In dramatic photographs, the leathery, lined faces of men and women who have spent a lifetime working cattle in the desert sun offer visual contrast to the sheer rock cliffs and barbed wire fences behind them. Light and shadow, earth and sky play through the vistas where little else is play. Sheriffs, homemakers, herders, store owners, and cattle ropers people the spaces. Features familiar to Big Bend aficionados, as well as remote areas usually seen only by those who live there, provide memorable scenes where the heat and even the silences almost emanate from the page. The old ranches of the region are breaking up; new landowners have come for different reasons and will put the land to different uses. But before the culture of rugged individualism and stoic stewardship of the land disappears completely, Wright and Van Cleef have captured it as a record of, and tribute to those who dared its challenges.

In Lone Star Rising, Elmer Kelton ("A Texas Legend," according to Texas Governor Rick Perry), brings together the first three books of his acclaimed Texas Ranger saga. The Buckskin Line introduces Rusty Shannon, the red-haired Comanche captive rescued and adopted by Mike Shannon, who is a member of a Texas "ranging company" that protects settlers from Indian raids. In the throes of the War Between the States, Rusty joins the Rangers and searches for the renegades who killed his adoptive father. In Badger Boy, the Rangers are disbanded and Rusty returns to his home on the Red River only to discover that the girl he loves has married another. In a time of personal turmoil as well as the post-war uphheaval in Texas, Rusty's childhood returns to haunt him as he rescues Andy Pickard, called Badger Boy by his Comanche captors. Andy and Rusty ride together in the newly reformed Rangers in The Way of the Coyote, in a time when Texas is overrun with outlaws, Confederate raiders, Ku Klux Klansmen, and marauding Comanches.

My Kind of Heroes was first published by State House Press in 1995 as a collection of four selected speeches by Elmer Kelton. This revised second edition, or Signature Edition, includes three of those pieces plus two new ones. The five essays are: ""My Kind of Heroes,"" ""Real Cowboys,"" ""Oil Boom Days in West Texas,"" ""The Truth of Fiction,"" and ""Politically Correct or Historically Correct?"" The signature on the front cover is Elmer Kelton's. As an author, he has always been generous about autographing books for his thousands of fans. This time we asked him to put his signature right up front. In many ways, these speeches, essays, or stories are his signature statement about many of the things he believes about the West, about writing, about history. Kelton fans, old and new, will cherish this keepsake edition.

Caprock, Texas, is a sleepy cow town until oil is discovered in the 1920s. Suddenly thousands of people stream in to find their fortune. Some are honest folk like Elise and Victor Underwood, who pray for a little luck with their daily bread. But too many are two-bit swindlers. And then there's frontier mobster Big Boy Daugherty. Sheriff Dave Buckalew faces a whole different set of circumstances as his town springs to life - in good and not-so-good ways. The town of Caprock is loosely based on Crane in West Texas, where Kelton grew up, although Crane did not exist until the oil boom. Honor at Daybreak represents a departure for Kelton. There is no single dominant figure. Although Sheriff Buckalew represents a quiet strength that binds his town together, this is a book in which an entire community joins together to save itself.

On the Texas frontier in the 1840s, a red-haired child whose family has been massacred is captured by a Comanche war party led by a great warrior named Buffalo Caller. The boy is rescued by Mike Shannon, a Mexican War veteran riding with a "ranging company" of Texans dedicated to protecting settlers against Indian raids, and is adopted by the Shannon family. In 1861 his adoptive father is bushwhacked and murdered and the boy--now known as Rusty Shannon--follows Mike's footsteps, riding to Fort Belknap to join the Rangers. Texas is now in the throes of secession and Union sympathizers are treated as traitors. One such "traitor" is Lon Monahan, whose family befriends Rusty. Lon Monahan's particular enemy is Colonel Caleb Dawkins, a former army officer and Confederate zealot determined to conscript the Monahan boys and drive Lon and all Unionists out of Texas. When the youngest Monahan attempts to escape Texas and wait out the war, Dawkins's thugs hang him and his father. Rusty Shannon carries heavy burdens. Both of his families are dead; he is haunted by Mike Shannon's murder, thinks he knows the culprit and intends to kill the man; his new-found friends have been lynched; and his duties as a Ranger conflict with his sense of justice. And he is fated to meet again the Comanche warrior whose band killed his family and took him captive over two decades ago: Buffalo Caller.

In this novel, first published by Doubleday in 1985, Texas novelist Elmer Kelton returns to the Civil War period, once again examining, as he first did in Texas Rifles, the effect of the war on Texans at home. Even while the conflict raged to the east, several groups of Texan Union loyalists hid out across the state, trying to avoid the anger and violence of the confederate-sympathizing “home guard.” Kelton bases this story on a group who lived in a then-huge thicket on the Colorado River near present-day Columbus, although the characters, incidents and town of the book are of Kelton’s invention. As he always says, fiction writers are liars and thieves. Owen Danforth, a wounded Confederate soldier, comes home to Texas to recover, intending to return to his regiment. His family is torn apart by the war—two brothers dead, one uncle, a Union sympathizer, shot in the back by the home guard. His father—also a Unionist—hides out in the thicket with his remaining family because the home guard, led by “Captain” Phineas Shattuck, has sworn revenge on the Danforth clan. Torn between duty and family loyalty, Owen Danforth faces difficult decisions until a violent encounter leaves him only one choice.

'An outstanding contribution to the historiography of the American West and likely will remain for a long time the definitive work on the Texas Panhandle' - Ernest Wallace. 'As one born in the region, Rathjen is sympathetic to it, but he is also understanding of it; there is little Chamber of Commerce stuff in his story' - Robert G. Athearn. The Texas Panhandleits eastern edge descending sharply from the plains into the canyons of Palo Duro, Tule, Quitaque, Casa Blanca, and Yellow House is as rich in history as it is in natural beauty. Long considered a crossroads of ancient civilizations, the twenty-six northernmost Texas counties lie on the southern reaches of the Great Plains, where numerous dry creek beds and the Canadian River have carved the region appropriately named the High Plains. Through these plains and their canyons, ancient peoples trailed game for the hunt. The Panhandle provided choice grazing lands for bison, and as the region became more familiar to ancient tribes, semipermanent camps marked the landscape. Yet when Coronado's conquistadores crossed the High Plains in search of fabled wealth and found sun-baked adobe instead of gold, they declared the region a wasteland. Likewise, the Republic of Texas found little use for their vast plains land considering settlement of the frontier far too dangerous. Not until the late-nineteenth century, as the U. S. Army waged war on the Comanches, Kiowas, and Cheyennes who lived there, did Panhandle tracts of frontier open to hard-bitten settlers who had to prove themselves as indomitable as they were land hungry. Departing from the premise that the Panhandle frontier 'is but a brush stroke on...[the] much larger canvas' of previous frontier histories, Rathjen challenges the work of Frederick Jackson Turner and Walter Prescott Webb, and proves that regional is by no means synonymous with provincial.

In the early days of the Texas panhandle, starting a new life is hard--but keeping it is even harder. Espy Norwood is a troubleshooter who's got troubles of his own--and more troubles find him when he lands a job on a ranch on the Texas plains. Bitter landowners plot against him, determined cattle thieves sneak right under his nose, and his own son refuses to trust or even know him. Can he catch the thieves, save the ranch, and win his son's love?

Welcome to Judge Roy Bean Country! The landscape is big enough and wild enough to contain any legend even one the size of Judge Roy Bean. Jack Skiles started with a determination to learn the truth behind the legend of Judge Roy Bean. Armed with a second-hand tape recorder in the 1960s, he interviewed Texas Rangers, ranchers, treasure hunters, and any Langtry old-timer with a good memory and a story to tell about the Judge. Forty years later, with a lifetime pursuing the truth, Skiles weaves that oral history and solid historical research into a compelling panorama of this harsh, forbidding land West of the Pecos. ""Judge Roy Bean Country"" sets right some of the most enduring myths about the Judge and Langtry. But here along the Rio Grande in the rugged Chihuahuan Desert there are many more tales to tell of heroes, villains, adventure, humor, and pure misery from the romantic Old West. Following Langtry native son Jack Skiles into the land West of the Pecos, prepare to meet one old reprobate by the name of Judge Roy Beanand history-telling at its very best.

As he flees to the sanctuary of Mexico, Chacho Fernandez is unaware of the fuel he has added to the already simmering racial hatreds in and around the quiet town of Domingo, Texas. Through events set in motion by a misunderstanding, Chacho becomes a folk hero to his people and a dangerous fugitive to a group of zealous lawmen. First published in 1974 by Ballantine Books, "Manhunters", the tale of Chacho's legendary flight, was inspired by the story of controversial Mexican fugitive Gregorio Cortez. In 1901 Cortez, a young horseman, shot a sheriff during an argument, leading to the largest concerted manhunt in Texas history. This novel is alive with the idiom of Kelton's native West Texas and freely punctuated with his trademark wry humour. His characters, both the ignorantly petty as well as the quietly strong, ring true to life.