The western genre is a classic and enduring part of American literature and cinema that continues to captivate audiences with its tales of rugged individualism, frontier justice, and the timeless battle between good and evil. Set against the backdrop of the untamed American West, typically in the latter half of the 19th century, westerns transport us to a world of dusty cowboys, quick-draw gunslingers, and lawless frontier towns. The western genre is characterized by the way it taps into, and challenges quintessential American myths and values – manifest destiny, the pioneer spirit, and the thirst for adventure and wide-open spaces. So, saddle up partner – it’s time to ride off into the sunset and rediscover an endlessly fascinating genre that continues to shape our popular culture and our understanding of what it means to be American.
When Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch arrive in Appaloosa, they find a small, dusty town suffering at the hands of renegade rancher Randall Bragg, a man who has so little regard for the law that he has taken supplies, horses, and women for his own and left the city marshal and one of his deputies for dead. Cole and Hitch, itinerant lawmen, are used to cleaning up after opportunistic thieves, but in Bragg they find an unusually wily adversary-one who raises the stakes by playing not with the rules, but with emotions.
City of Rocks is built around a clever conceit: the interviews of Joseph Roper as part of the American Legends Collection, an offshoot of the Federal Writers Project. Roper is interviewed in 1938, when he is 76, about the events of 1879, when he was 17 and found himself tracking the McCandles gang. Roper is the only one to take action when his town of Coalville, Idaho, is terrorized by the gang. While the rest of the town cowers in a darkened restaurant, Roper takes off after Ian McCandles, who has shot his friend and employer, the sheriff, and kidnapped Lucy a highly desired woman in the town.
Born to the life of a Southern gentleman, Dr. John Henry Holliday arrives on the Texas frontier hoping that the dry air and sunshine of the West will restore him to health. Soon, with few job prospects, Doc Holliday is gambling professionally with his partner, Maria Katarina Harmony, a high-strung, classically educated Hungarian whore. In search of high-stakes poker, the couple hits the saloons of Dodge City. And that is where the unlikely friendship of Doc Holliday and a fearless lawman named Wyatt Earp begins- before the gunfight at the O.K. Corral links their names forever in American frontier mythology-when neither man wanted fame or deserved notoriety
When Tom Chaney got drunk and shot Frank Ross, fourteen-year-old Mattie Rose Moss was convinced that Chaney represented an eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth case. She lit out from Dardanelle, Arkansas, determined to be Tom’s fitting executioner and negotiated for the help of Rooster Cogburn, a U.S. Marshal of wide repute, mean disposition, and deadly fast draw. Despite his initial reluctance and the unwelcome presence of a pesky bounty hunter who wanted to take Chaney alive, Mattie Rose crossed into the Indian Territory, where (in the 1880’s) scalping was more common than barbering, and she brought down her quarry after a series of Pearl White climaxes. Annoyed by the loose allusions to her great adventure made by an Arkansas housewife-historian, middle-aged Mattie Rose sets all the record straight in a positive Presbyterian no-nonsense first person that is marvelously funny.
The year is 1876. Warring Indian tribes still populate America’s western territories even as lawless gold-rush towns begin to mark the landscape. Against this backdrop two paleontologists pillage the Wild West for dinosaur fossils, while deceiving and sabotaging each other in a rivalry that will come to be known as the Bone Wars.
Into this treacherous territory plunges William Johnson, a Yale student with more privilege than sense. Determined to win a bet against his arch-rival, William has joined world-renowned paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh on his latest expedition. But Marsh becomes convinced that William is spying for his nemesis, Edwin Drinker Cope, and abandons him in Cheyenne, Wyoming, a locus of crime and vice.
Soon William joins forces with Cope and stumbles upon a discovery of historic proportions. The struggle to protect this extraordinary treasure, however, will test William’s newfound resilience and pit him against some of the West’s most dangerous and notorious characters…
In the wake of the Civil War, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd travels through northern Texas, giving live readings from newspapers to paying audiences hungry for news of the world. An elderly widower who has lived through three wars and fought in two of them, the captain enjoys his rootless, solitary existence. In Wichita Falls, he is offered a $50 gold piece to deliver a young orphan to her relatives in San Antonio. Four years earlier, a band of Kiowa raiders killed Johanna’s parents and sister; sparing the little girl, they raised her as one of their own. Recently rescued by the U.S. army, the ten-year-old has once again been torn away from the only home she knows. Their 400-mile journey south through unsettled territory and unforgiving terrain proves difficult and at times dangerous. Johanna has forgotten the English language, tries to escape at every opportunity, throws away her shoes, and refuses to act ‘civilized.’ Yet as the miles pass, the two lonely survivors tentatively begin to trust each other, forming a bond that marks the difference between life and death in this treacherous land. Arriving in San Antonio, the reunion is neither happy nor welcome. The captain must hand Johanna over to an aunt and uncle she does not remember — strangers who regard her as an unwanted burden. A respectable man, Captain Kidd is faced with a terrible choice: abandon the girl to her fate or become — in the eyes of the law — a kidnapper himself.
Texas Ranger Andy Pickard is ordered to find and arrest Bannister and bring him to trial. The Bannister case turns out to be anything but routine. Pickard picks up Bannister’s trail and finds him holed up with some cohorts who wound and vow to kill the young Ranger. Ironically, Bannister saves Pickard’s life by fending off the would-be killers and taking Andy to a cow camp where his injury can be treated. When he is able to ride, Andy locates and trails Geneva Bannister, Donley’s young wife, hoping she will lead him to the wanted man. The trail takes unexpected turns and Near Fort Concho Andy’s mission is interrupted by an ugly racial incident in which a black soldier is killed; Bannister is shot by outlaw Curly Tadlock and left for dead; and Tadlock brutally assaults Geneva. Andy Pickard, newly married, still unsure of himself and his choice of Rangering as a career, must unravel this tangled series of events and accomplish his mission of bringing an accused killer to justice.
The day of her wedding, 17 year old Ada’s life looks good; she loves her husband, and she loves working as an apprentice to her mother, a respected midwife. But after a year of marriage and no pregnancy, in a town where barren women are routinely hanged as witches, her survival depends on leaving behind everything she knows. She joins up with the notorious Hole in the Wall Gang, a band of outlaws led by a preacher-turned-robber known to all as the Kid. Charismatic, grandiose, and mercurial, the Kid is determined to create a safe haven for outcast women. But to make this dream a reality, the Gang hatches a treacherous plan that may get them all killed. And Ada must decide whether she’s willing to risk her life for the possibility of a new kind of future for them all.
When beautiful Angelina Foley presents Tom Radigan with a Spanish grant and claims ownership of his land, he realizes he’s up against a cunning and deadly opportunist. Foley wants him off Vache Creek immediately, and with three thousand head of cattle, an outfit of hardcase gunfighters, and winter coming on, she is unwilling to take no for an answer. But Radigan has worked four hard years building up his ranch. Fighting for it–and, if he has to, killing for it–is something he is more than willing to do. If Angelina Foley and her men think he is the kind of man to give up without a fight, they are dead wrong.
Orphaned young, Ming Tsu, the son of Chinese immigrants, is raised by the notorious leader of a California crime syndicate, who trains him to be his deadly enforcer. But when Ming falls in love with Ada, the daughter of a powerful railroad magnate, and the two elope, he seizes the opportunity to escape to a different life. Soon after, in a violent raid, the tycoon’s henchmen kidnap Ada and conscript Ming into service for the Central Pacific Railroad.
Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. The enigmatic and powerful man known only as the Commodore has ordered it, and his henchmen, Eli and Charlie Sisters, will make sure of it. Though Eli doesn’t share his brother’s appetite for whiskey and killing, he’s never known anything else. But their prey isn’t an easy mark, and on the road from Oregon City to Warm’s gold-mining claim outside Sacramento, Eli begins to question what he does for a living-and whom he does it for.
Eli McCullough is thirteen years old when a marauding band of Comanches takes him captive. Brave and clever, Eli quickly adapts to life among the Comanches, learning their ways and waging war against their enemies, including white men, which complicates his sense of loyalty and understanding of who he is. But when disease, starvation, and overwhelming numbers of armed Americans decimate the tribe, Eli finds himself alone. Neither white nor Indian, civilized nor fully wild, he must carve a place for himself in a world in which he does not fully belong, a journey of adventure, tragedy, hardship, grit, and luck that reverberates in the lives of his progeny.