Elmer Kelton

The Smiling Country, filled with pathos and humor, is set in the last days of the Old West. Hewey Calloway may be pushing 45, but he can still rope and outride most things on four legs. Refusing promotions, he prefers to remain a simple ranch hand. But as he rides the west Texas plains, automobiles are beginning to dot the landscape. When Hewey is critically injured by a wild horse, he must admit that his world-and an age-are passing away.

Hewey Calloway, one of the best-loved cowboys in all of Western fiction, returns in this novel of his younger years as he and his beloved brother Walter leave the family farm in 1889 to find work in the West Texas cow country. The brothers are polar opposites. Walter pines for a sedate life as a farmer, with wife and children; Hewey is a fiddle-footed cowboy content to work at six bits--75 cents--a day on the Pecos River ranch owned by the penny-pinching...

The Barfield brothers are separated by a Comanche raid. Years later, they are destined to be reunited and discover how their separate lives have changed them.

In 1816, Mordecai Lewis, a veteran of Andrew Jackson's Indian campaigns and battles against the British, moves his family into the western Tennessee canebrakes. But Mordecai, a born wanderer, is not satisfied with farming, and with his sons Michael and Andrew and some other backwoodsmen, he leads a foray into Spanish-held Texas to hunt wild horses and return the mustang herd to sell in Tennessee. Crossing the Sabine River, Mordecai's party encounters...

Deputy Sheriff Jim-Bob McClain isn't sure he's ready to follow in his father's footsteps as the law in Coolridge County. In fact, he has a hard enough time keeping the peace between the drunks in the local saloon. But with tough Sheriff Mont Naylor to back him up he figures he can handle whatever comes his way. Jim-Bob's first real assignment is no piece of cake. He must escort a ruthless outlaw into the hands of justice. All seems well with the...

From rodeos to rustlers, from ranch life to the outlaw trail, Elmer Kelton's take on the human condition shows us life in Texas as it was back then: simpler, but harder, with danger always present. Readers will meet several unforgettable characters, including a young veteran who overcomes his PTSD to fight a fire ravaging his town, a sheriff who continues to chase bandits despite having lost his job, and a frontier housewife who refuses to let her...

For Gage Jameson, the summer of 1873 has been a poor hunt. A year ago he felled sixty-two buffalo in one stand, but now the great Arkansas River herd is gone, like the Republican herd before it. In Dodge City, old hide hunters speak is awe of a last great heard to the south--but no hunter who values his scalp dares ride south of the Cimarron and into Comanche territory. None but Gage Jameson.... At the Publisher's request, this title is being...

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...

Aging Texas gunfighter Joe Pepper reminisces about his life of adventure throughout the Old Southwest while preparing to face the hangman's noose.

For Confederate veteran Jeff Layne, the days of slaughter are over. He has fought the Comanches at Adobe Walls and hunted buffalo on the Staked Plains. Now he wants nothing more than to settle down to the quiet life of a Texas rancher.