Riders of the Purple Sage

Author	Jack Schaefer
ISBN	0395941164

A stranger rode out of the heart of the great glowing West, into the small Wyoming valley in the summer of 1889.
It was Shane, who appeared on the horizon and became a friend and guardian to the Starrett family at a time when homesteaders and cattle rangers battled for territory and survival. Jack Schaefer’s...

Author	Owen Wister
ISBN	0743238028

In the untamed West, pioneers came to test their fortunes -- and their wills. The Wyoming territory was a harsh, unforgiving land, with its own unwritten code of honor by which men lived and died. Into this rough landscape rides the Virginian, a solitary man whose unbending will is his only guide through...

Author	Elmer Kelton
ISBN	0812574516

To the ranchers and farmers of 1950s Texas, man's biggest enemy is one he can't control. With their entire livelihood pegged on the chance of a wet year or a dry year, drought has the ability to crush their whole enterprise, to determine who stands and who falls, and to take food out of the mouths of the workers...

Author	Glendon Swarthout
ISBN	0803238231

By the author of The Homesman, now a major motion picture The Shootist is John Bernard Books, a gunfighter at the turn of the twentieth century who must confront the greatest Shootist of all: Death. Most men would end their days in bed or take their own lives, but a gunfighter has a third option, one that...

Author	Andy Adams
ISBN	0618083480

A classic fictional chronicle of life on the open trail, THE LOG OF A COWBOY has long been considered the best and most reliable account of real cowboy life ever written.
In the years following the Civil War, sixteen-year-old Andy Adams left his home in the San Antonio Valley and took to the range....

Author	Isabella Lucy Bird
ISBN	1885211570

One of my favorite travel books by this intrepid Englishwoman, traveling through the "backwoods" of Japan in 1878. Though she was an invalid when at home, she rode horseback through wild country, was out in the elements during downpours that led to landslides and washed-out roads, slept on the floor,...