Elmer Kelton
Author
Series
Summary
Hewey Calloway has a problem. In his west Texas home of 1906, the land and way of life he loves are changing too quickly. As Hewey struggles against the relentless stream of progress, he comes to realize that the simple life of his childhood is vanishing - and that every choice he makes requires a sacrifice. --
3) Many a river
Author
Pub. Date
2008
Formats
Summary
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.
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Summary
"The Time It Never Rained was inspired by actual events, when the longest and most severe drought in living memory pressed ranchers and farmers to the outer limits of courage and endurance."-Elmer Kelton, Seven-time Spur Award-winning author
Rio Seco was too small to afford a professional manager for its one-room Chamber of Commerce.
And Rio Seco, meaning "dry river" in Spanish, symbolizes the biggest enemy of the ranchers and farmers in 1950s Texas,...
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"The Smiling Country is about a footloose puncher who finds out the hard way that cowboys don't remain young forever and that the inevitable wear and tear of a rugged life forces changes and compromises on the willing and unwilling alike."- Elmer Kelton
Hewey Calloway did not know how old he was without stopping to figure, and that distracted his attention from matters of real importance.
Elmer Kelton introduced Texas cowboy Hewey Calloway, one...
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Series
Summary
Ranger Andy Pickard and his partner, Logan Daggett, are sent to central Texas to investigate a series of killings and cattle thefts. The two biggest cattlemen in the area blame each other for the violence, but it seems to Andy that neither man may be guilty. The case is complicated by the rise of a gang of "regulators" - masked vigilantes - and the arrival of a notorious hired gunman whose employer is unknown.
Author
Series
Summary
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...
Author
Series
Texas Rangers volume 5
Summary
In this fifth volume of his Texas Rangers series, Elmer Kelton takes the young ranger Andy Pickard, once a Comanche captive called Badger Boy, into the midst of a bloody vendetta between hate-filled families. Pickard and ranger Farley Brackett, a former Confederate soldier, are assigned to deliver prisoner Jayce Landon to the sheriff of a neighboring county to stand trial for killing a man named Ned Hopper but from the outset the seemingly simple...
Author
Pub. Date
1996
Summary
In the cattle drives of the Old West, pumpkin rollers were green farm boys, almost more trouble than they were worth.
When Trey McLean leaves his family's East Texas cotton farm and sets off on his own to learn the cattleman's trade, he's about as green as they come. But, Trey learns fast. He learns about deceit when a con man cheats him out of his grubstake and about love when he meets the woman he's destined to marry.
And, when luck finally sets...
10) Bitter trail
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Summary
In Bitter Trail, Kelton tells the story of a tough teamster named Frio Wheeler whose wagons haul cotton from Texas to Mexico.
Sounds like a peaceable enterprise?
The problem is that the Civil War is raging throughout the South and Wheeler's cotton is to be sold for gold--gold used to buy guns and ammunition for the Confederate army.
And, added to his balky mules, the broiling heat, and killing drought of the Mexican dessert, Wheeler has even more...
11) Ranger's trail
Author
Series
Texas Rangers volume 4
Summary
In the spring of 1874 the Ranger companies that protect settlers against Indian raids and outlaw bands are being reorganized and David "Rusty" Shannon is the most sought-after veteran for reenlistment.
But Shannon has new goals for his life: He is in love with Josie Monahan, daughter of the family that adopted him, and he intends to marry Josie and take her to his farm on the Colorado River. Rusty also feels affection and responsibility for Andy...
12) Joe Pepper
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Series
Summary
Joe Pepper is a Texas badman with quite a past. In fact, there isn't much that Joe hasn't done in his forty years of living on both sides of the Texas law-except face the hangman. Now, convicted of murder, Joe is about to get that privilege. But before he goes, Joe has a few things he wants to say-and a few stories that he wants to set straight.
With Joe Pepper, legendary Western writer Elmer Kelton tells a fine and moving tale of the history of...
13) Sons of Texas
Author
Series
Sons of Texas trilog volume 1
Pub. Date
2005
Formats
Summary
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...
14) Badger boy
Author
Series
Lexile Measure
700L
Summary
The Civil War is over and Confederate Texas is reluctantly yielding to Union military peace-keepers and regulations imposed by Washington. David "Rusty" Shannon is the member of a "ranging company" attempting to protect Texas settlers from Comanche depredations. He learns that the rangers are being disbanded. He makes his way home to his farm on the Colorado River, and discovers that the land around his home is filled with hostiles Indians, Confederates,...
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In later years people often asked Hugh Hitchcock about the Canadian River cowboy strike of 1883. Wagon boss Hugh Hitchcock knows the cowboy life better than most: In 1883 if you're a cowboy, you can't own a cow and you are stigmatized as a drunk. Worse, you are exploited by the wealthy cattle owners who fence the range, replace traditions and trust with written rules of employment, refuse to pay a livable wage and change things that ought to be left...
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In 1875, nearly forty years after the Mexican War, Mexicans and Texans are still spilling blood over ownership of the Nueces Strip--a hot, dry stretch of coastal prairie that bushwackers and horse thieves have turned into a lawless hell.
Captain L.H. McNelly, a complex and determined Confederate veteran, is brought into the Nueces Strip for one purpose: to keep the peace. His measures are harsh and controversial--but McNelly wasn't sent in to be...
17) The manhunters
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Working faithfully for a Texas rancher despite his family's warnings, Chacho Fernandez steals his payment when his dishonest employer refuses to compensate him and is falsely accused of murdering a lawman.
18) After the bugles
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Sam Houston's victory at San Jacinto has made Texas an independent republic. Along with other settlers whose lives have been disrupted by the revolution, Joshua Buckalew tries to put the pieces back together. He finds that starting over in the aftermath of war can be as challenging as war itself. The racial differences that helped foment the conflict have not disappeared -- and being an independent republic can be more difficult than being a colony...
19) The far canyon
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Series
Summary
Spur-award-winning author Elmer Kelton delivers the sequel to his novel Slaughter with this powerful story of one man's search for peace on the war-stricken plains of the Wild West.
In The Far Canyon, Kelton masterfully unveils for his reader the finality of the buffalo's demise, the beginning of a time when cattle would replace the American bison on the southern plains and ultimately end the Plains Indian culture.
The novel reveals the history...
Author
Summary
When Texan-born Josh Buckalew met Teresa, a young and beautiful Mexican woman, it was love at first sight. But with the Alamo recently sieged and destroyed, Josh knew this rosebud love would be unobtainable on account of the war thorns harrowing the country.
So the Buckalew brothers, Josh and Thomas, along with Josh's friend Muley, the man-child, come together with other Texans to protect their land at Goliad against the Mexicans who have just ravished...