FICTION / Westerns

Like many of Conley’s works, “Plastic Indian” is set in contemporary times, but as we discover through the stories that follow, the author drew inspiration from traditional Cherokee folktales and oral storytelling. His delight in the spoken word is evident in the single play featured in this volume, based on the writings of ethnographer James Mooney and originally performed for radio.

Frank on the Prairie was only one of a handful of books to which Russell added illustrations during his career. It is one of even fewer to contain watercolors. Showcasing Russell’s artistry and his perspective on the American West, the volume is, in Minckler’s words, “one of Russell’s most personalized works of art.”

The year is 1902. A young stock-handler named Fenton Pardee has just survived the train wreck that almost destroyed William F. Cody’s Wild West show. Surveying the train’s smoldering ruins—and what is left of Cody’s company of stunt-riders, trick-shooters, and stage actors—Fenton realizes that turning the West into a circus to thrill the world is no longer thrilling for him. Blue Heaven marks the return of Fenton Pardee, veteran guide and packer, who figured so memorably in High Country, Willard Wyman’s highly acclaimed first novel.

During the Great Depression, young Ty Hardin is sent from his family’s failing Montana ranch to learn from the last of the great packers, Fenton Pardee, legendary in the Montana Rockies for his packing adventures across the Swan Range all the way to the Big Divide. Writing in the tradition of Norman Maclean’s A River Runs through It, Willard Wyman shares techniques of breaking and packing and leading animals into forbidding country, hunting and tracking, and making camp. Wyman brings you so close to the packer’s life you smell the leather, sweat, and oil.

In Bugles in the Afternoon, legendary Western writer Ernest Haycox relates a compelling tale of Custer’s famed Seventh Cavalry and its fate at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in a balanced mix of action, exposition, and history. Originally published in 1943, this classic work is now back in print in a new paperback edition. Historian Richard W. Etulain examines the novel’s history and Haycox’s impact on a timeless genre in an original foreword.

Taking his title, Pasó Por Aquí, from Juan de Oñate’s carving in the living rock of El Morro, New Mexico, Eugene Manlove Rhodes created his own memorial to the decent people of his world who had “passed this way” without fanfare.

Rhodes wrote about them with wit, gusto, and tenderness, with honesty, clarity, and a sureness of interpretation as yet unequaled. He captured for all time the free, lonely, self-reliant, skilled, eternally optimistic essence of his West.