Former Santa Fe detective Kevin Kerney probes the murder of a friend's son, an officer on a missile base in New Mexico. Kerney teams up with the woman leading the base's own investigation and they uncover a racket, men smuggling antique weapons and gold coins across the border.
A historical novel based on one family's struggle to conquer the Tularosa Basin of south-central New Mexico in 1885-1915, and the price they had to pay in human suffering and political abuse for their efforts and eventual success. As interpreted one century later from the published records, reports to the Governor, New Mexico State Archives, and family lore by one of their first generation descendants.
Biography of the man who killed Billy the Kid, this thorough and well-written analysis deals effectively with almost every question that has been raised about the controversial life and death of Pat Garrett.
After the deaths of his wife and brother, John Kerney gives up his West Texas ranch and heads south in search of a new home. Soon Kerney is offered work trailing cattle to the New Mexico Territory--a job that will forever change his life.
Young Gillom Rogers has just given the coup de grace to a famous gunfighter involved in a bloody saloon shootout in 1901 El Paso, Texas. After swiping J.B. Books's matched Remington pistols off his body, Gillom thinks he may be able to ride this spectacle to fame and glory as the last shootist. But Gillom is an eighteen-year-old with lots of growing up to do, and showing off his new pistols quickly gets him into a gunfight he didn't bargain for. Gillom sets out for adventure, determined to become a shootist like his hero, John Bernard Books. On his dangerous journey into manhood, he runs into yellow journalists, a New Mexican horse breaker, and a train robber. When he meets a Hispanic saloon dancer named Anel in the booming copper mining town of Bisbee, Arizona, Gillom Rogers is forced to reconsider what kind of man he really wants to be. Miles Swarthout's The Last Shootist is the sequel to one of the most famous Westerns ever written, and concludes the tale of a junior shootist's coming-of-age in a dazzling gunfight in a deadly pimp's whorehouse, as a trio of fiery teenagers ride hard into a new twentieth century.
Cowboy and drifter Frank Clifford lived a lot of lives—and raised a lot of hell—in the first quarter of his life. The number of times he changed his name—Clifford being just one of them—suggests that he often traveled just steps ahead of the law. During the 1870s and 1880s his restless spirit led him all over the Southwest, crossing the paths of many of the era’s most notorious characters, most notably Clay Allison and Billy the Kid. More than just an entertaining and informative narrative of his Wild West adventures, Clifford’s memoir also paints a picture of how ranchers and ordinary folk lived, worked, and stayed alive during those tumultuous years. Written in 1940 and edited and annotated by Frederick Nolan, Deep Trails in the Old West is likely one of the last eyewitness histories of the old West ever to be discovered. As Frank Clifford, the author rode with outlaw Clay Allison’s Colfax County vigilantes, traveled with Charlie Siringo, cowboyed on the Bell Ranch, contended with Apaches, and mined for gold in Hillsboro. In 1880 he was one of the Panhandle cowboys sent into New Mexico to recover cattle stolen by Billy the Kid and his compañeros—and in the process he got to know the Kid dangerously well. In unveiling this work, Nolan faithfully preserves Clifford’s own words, providing helpful annotation without censoring either the author’s strong opinions or his racial biases. For all its roughness, Deep Trails in the Old West is a rich resource of frontier lore, customs, and manners, told by a man who saw the Old West at its wildest—and lived to tell the tale.