Tom Doan joins the buffalo hunters going into the Southwest's inhospitable Staked Plain. Seeing huge herds there, he thinks of getting rich off their hides. He proves efficient as a skinner, and what follows is almost a literal baptism in sweat and blood. Fighting the Comanches and Kiowas, some unscrupulous white hunters, and his own conscience, he ages fast -- all the faster in facing obstacles to love's consummation with Milly. She, like Tom, is...

September 1873. Elizabeth Coughlin, a widow bankrupted by her husband's folly and death, embarks on a buffalo hunt with her estranged brother-in-law, Michael. She hopes to salvage something of her former life and the lives of the hired men and their families who depend on her. The buffalo hunt that her husband had planned, she now realizes, was his last hope for saving their land. As they ride across the Deadline demarcating Indian Territory from...

"Buffalo Wagons: 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 in 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." "Cloudy in the West: In the Texas backlands...

The Champion Buffalo Hunter is the fascinating memoir of one of the most legendary frontiersmen of the early West, "Yellowstone Vic" Smith. Born Victor Grant Smith in 1850, he lived a colorful life across the American frontier from the 1870s to 1890s. A classic frontiersman, he was a trapper, dispatch rider, scout, trick shot -- and, yes, buffalo hunter extraordinaire. Discovered in Harvard University's Houghton Library in 1990, this remarkable autobiography...

"The epic story of the buffalo in America, from prehistoric times to today--a moving and beautifully illustrated work of natural history. The American buffalo--our nation's official mammal-is an improbable, shaggy beast that has found itself at the center of many of our most mythic and sometimes heartbreaking tales. The largest land animals in the Western Hemisphere, they are survivors of a mass extinction that erased ancient species that were even...