Elmer Kelton

To Elmer Kelton, the brush country of southwest Texas is home. Nobody knows Texas's history, people, beauty, and dangers as well as this greatest of Western writers. Barbed Wire, the first novel in this omnibus, is the story of one-time cowboy Doug Monahan, who runs a fencing crew outside the town of Twin Wells. Monahan, a likeable, hard-working Irishman, and his workers dig post-holes and string red painted barbwire for ranchers as protection against...

The Barfield brothers are separated by a Comanche raid. Years later, they are destined to be reunited and discover how their separate lives have changed them.

Hewey Calloway, one of the best-loved cowboys in all of Western fiction, returns in this novel of his younger years as he and his beloved brother Walter leave the family farm in 1889 to find work in the West Texas cow country. The brothers are polar opposites. Walter pines for a sedate life as a farmer, with wife and children; Hewey is a fiddle-footed cowboy content to work at six bits-75 cents-a day on the Pecos River ranch owned by the penny-pinching...

In the spring of 1874 the Ranger companies that protect settlers against Indian raids and outlaw bands are being reorganized and David "Rusty" Shannon is the most sought-after veteran for reenlistment. But Shannon has new goals for his life: He is in love with Josie Monahan, daughter of the family that adopted him, and he intends to marry Josie and take her to his farm on the Colorado River. Rusty also feels affection and responsibility for Andy...

In 1816, Mordecai Lewis, a veteran of Andrew Jackson's Indian campaigns and battles against the British, moves his family into the western Tennessee canebrakes. But Mordecai, a born wanderer, is not satisfied with farming, and with his sons Michael and Andrew and some other backwoodsmen, he leads a foray into Spanish-held Texas to hunt wild horses and return the mustang herd to sell in Tennessee. Crossing the Sabine River, Mordecai's party encounters...

In post-Civil War Texas, Andy Pickard, once known to his Comanche "family" as Badger Boy, is now in his mid-twenties and riding with the Texas Rangers. While delivering a prisoner for trial, he becomes entangled in a feud between the Landon and Hopper families. Andy works to help Jayce Landon, while at the same time keeping the boy Scooter Tennyson from being pulled into a life of crime. Lives are at stake, loyalties tested, and the worst aspects...

In the Texas backlands in 1885, twelve-year-old Joey Shipman's father dies under mysterious circumstances, and the boy is forced to live with his stepmother and Blair Meacham, a hanger-on at the farm. After the death of a black farmhand and friend, and another "accident”, that almost takes Joey's life, the boy runs away and joins forces with his only kin-Beau Shipman, a drunk and a jailbird. Beau, along with an outlaw, a San Antonio prostitute,...

In the cattle drives of the Old West, pumpkin rollers were green farm boys, almost more trouble than they were worth. When Trey McLean leaves his family's East Texas cotton farm and sets off on his own to learn the cattleman's trade, he's about as green as they come. But, Trey learns fast. He learns about deceit when a con man cheats him out of his grubstake and about love when he meets the woman he's destined to marry. And, when luck finally sets...

Setting out to arrest a trader accused of killing a horse thief, young Texas Ranger Andy Pickard finds the case complicated by the trader's honor-bound nature, a situation that makes Andy wonder if he is fighting on the right side.