Showing results by author "Melvin Litton" in All Categories

Riding the crest of the bloody tide is Jim Caspion, a Civil War veteran turned buffalo hunter, a man of notable conscience and courage, ever haunted by the war, yet fleeing settlement and routine, forswearing the practicable for the exotic, the forbidden, and the extreme. From the opening when he rides into a buffalo stampede to escape a band of Cheyenne, to the very end, his fate is inexorably tied to the white buffalo he spies in his harrowing flight. Thereafter, its spiritual aspect exerts a growing influence over his own wry, sensual nature, altering his outlook.

Begins in blood and ends in fire, Nine Lives of Sadie Briar traces one woman's quietly heroic journey through an American century. From an Indian raid on the Kansas frontier in 1869 when she's briefly taken captive as a baby to Christmas Eve 1968 when she witnesses man first orbit the moon, Sadie experiences an epochal range of event and emotion through two husbands, a son and a daughter, and a giant grandson, deemed an idiot, abandoned to her faithful care over her final 50 years.

Jack Marshal, known as "the Lion," is a prideful sinner and reckless womanizer. When his 15-year-old daughter, Bonny, winds up pregnant by an old running buddy, Jack is outraged. And when the man is found dead, Jack is charged with murder.

In the summer of 1975, a group of young men known as "the boys" make their stab for freedom harvesting wild hemp, or marijuana, on the Kansas plains. Several are Vietnam vets, and all are somehow marked, at odds with their time. They see themselves as inheritors of the mythic West, like buffalo hunters in league with their captain, Frankie Sage. As long as they remain unarmed, their crime is counted only a misdemeanor. But a rival gang led by Valentine LaReese is prone to gunplay.

Before Jesse James or Billy the Kid, there was Joaquín Murrieta - lover, bandit, revolutionary. On July 25, 1853, a troop of California Rangers killed and beheaded the young bandit. It was believed his army numbered in the hundreds and that he planned to sweep the country south to Sonora. Thinking the matter ended, the Rangers preserved his head in a bucket of whiskey and rode to Sacramento to collect their reward. Yet with his death, his fame only grew, along with rumors of his ghost in haunt of the Rangers.