No one is more surprised than Mattie Spenser herself when Luke Spenser, considered the great catch of their small Iowa town, asks her to marry him. Less than a month later, they are off in a covered wagon to build a home on the Colorado frontier. Mattie's only company is a slightly mysterious husband and her private journal, where she records the joys and frustrations not just of frontier life, but also of a new marriage to a handsome but distant...

"Powerful. . . impressive. . . [an] epic of the 1840s frontier." -Dallas Morning News With soaring and masterful prose, James Carlos Blake brings to life an enthralling historical time and place-and a cast of memorable characters-in a stunning tale of dark instinct, blood reckoning, and fates forged in the zeal of America's "Manifest Destiny." The offspring of a whore mother and a homicidal father, Edward and John Little are driven from their home...

This is the autobiography of the famous Henry F. Hoyt, a medical doctor and notable adventurer of the American West. His career started as a physician in the Goldrush town Deadwood, before moving west into the Texas Panhandle. He was by turns a Doctor, a Vigilante, and a Cowboy, and he recounts stories of Charlie Siringo, John Chisum, Cole Younger, Billy The Kid, Jesse James, and many other figures of the Wild West. During the Spanish-American War,...

Who was Billy the Kid? Was he Henry McCarty, Henry Antrim or William H. Bonny? Was he a Robin Hood or a cold-blooded outlaw? History says he was a little of both, but in this book Donald Cline exposes Billy the Kid as a cowardly crook, who did not hesitate to kill for money. Cline explodes all the popular myths and misrepresentations to bring us an authentic Billy the Kid, a cattle rustler, horse thief and murderer.