Showing results by author "Johnny D" in All Categories

Bass Reeves was a man of color and a deputy United States marshal. For thirteen years he was aided by Dave Adams, also a deputy marshal, and a white man. Bennie Reeves was Bass Reeves' son and a barber, a good one, before he shot down his unarmed wife who had been cheating on him and then disappeared. U.S. Marshal Leo E. Bennett, known as Doc, had reservations about handing the warrant to Bass Reeves to be served against Bennie. But for Bass there was no reservation...

Jeremiah Cole has been sentenced to hang for lynching a priest. But Father Virgilio is convinced that he will escape execution and has raised a reward for anyone who will transport the prisoner to Chama.

Jim Hawkins hardly said a word to anybody, but that all changed in the spring of 1920 when Hawkins took his young grandson, Henry Lancaster, along on a scouting trip. Scouting for memories. The man who rarely talked tells his grandson how he came to Montana from Texas as a young teenager with his pards Tommy O'Hallahan and John Henry Kenton, cowboys looking for country free of barbed wire, and how the winter of 1886-87 changed his life.

In The Big Fifty, another name for the famous Sharps rifle, reality of frontier life becomes brutally clear to 12-year-old Coady McIlvain. He falls in with a buffalo sharpshooter, and the two must survive the unforgiving terrain and hostile enemies.

What’s a 16-year-old boy to do when he learns that his stepmother and a local judge have murdered his father and now plan to kill him, too? Well, when it’s 1906, and you can play pretty good second base, you join a barn-storming baseball team making its way across Kansas. It also helps that the team is the Kansas City National Bloomer Girls. After all, who’d look for a runaway boy disguised as a girl on a women’s team that competes against town-ball teams of male players? Of course, it’ll take more than long hair, a Spalding glove, and a quick bat to stay alive.

Noah Benton, a teenager with a great memory, a head for arithmetic, and dreams of excitement, is hired along with his older brother to help drive a herd of Texas longhorns to Abilene, Kansas. But Noah's trail boss happens to be John Wesley Hardin, a notorious killer who thinks Texas lawmen won't look for a fugitive in a crew of hardworking cowboys. After Hardin sees a profit in Noah's ability to count and memorize cards in gambling dens, Noah's dreams of excitement quickly turn into nightmares - for Hardin will kill with little provocation.

I do remember my first love Mad Carter MacRae recalls in this memoir of his early life. Her name was Estrella O Sullivan. I met her the summer I turned 16 back in 1873. The summer of 1873 marked my last drive up what these days they call the Chisholm Trail and what some were starting to call it back then. It was the first time I tasted oysters and the only time I pinned on a badge. It was the summer of longhorns of miserable heat of friendship and betrayal and of murder. In the end it was the summer the whole world came crumbling down on our United States. My world crashed too.

William Clarke Quantrill was a hated name during the War Between the States by the Federals of the Union Army as well as by many non-combatants. Even the high command of the Confederacy distrusted him. But there were others who were passionate sympathizers. He was both friend and mentor but also manipulator and opportunist. Alistair Durant was someone who came to know him in all these guises. Durant was a young Confederate soldier captured by the Yankees and released when he took an oath never again to bear arms against the Union.

They sing songs about Matthew Johnson. The hero of dime novels, Matt won national fame during a range war in Idaho when he shot and killed an outlaw - and former saddle pal. But the past 17 years have been an alcoholic blur rather than a heroic journey. Gone are the days when he was a free-wheeling cowboy, swapping poems with his best friend on the cattle ranges. The West has modernized - and practically disappeared - when Matt arrives in Denver in 1894 as the newly appointed US marshal for the state of Colorado.

A selection of magical stories to entertain your children whilst you are waiting at the airport and are flying to your holiday.