James Goodenough, whose family had originally settled in Connecticut from England brings his family to Ohio to carve out a new life for them in the Black Swamp in 1838. As swamp fever gradually picks off their children and they wrestle daily with survival. This course will see their family engulfed in tragedy and fifteen years later we pick up with their youngest son, Robert who has been running west since the trying to escape his memories of what...

This New York Times Notable Book is a “sweeping historical drama” of a physician and his family on the Illinois frontier in the nineteenth century (The New York Times Book Review).

Dr. Robert Judson Cole travels from his ravaged Scotland homeland, through the operating rooms of Boston, to the cabins of frontier Illinois. In the wilderness he befriends the starving remnants of the Sauk tribe, who have fled their reservation.

...

A lawman with a past. A gunman with a grudge. A blood-soaked massacre just waiting to happen. Welcome back to Rattlesnake Wells, Wyoming... In a wild frontier boomtown like Rattlesnake Wells, it's hard to know who to lock up, who to let out, and who to gun down. But as town marshal, it's Bob Hatfield's job to separate the sinners from the saints - or at least keep them from killing each other. Now there's a new boy in town. He's fresh out of prison....

Drawn to a Montana homestead and to a strange childhood companion she'd long forgotten, Joanna Chase and others converge on this remote ranch where a madman lurks with a vision to save the future through murder, forcing them all to come together to save themselves--and humanity. As a girl, Joanna Chase thrived on Rustling Willows Ranch in Montana until tragedy upended her life. Now thirty-four and living in Santa Fe with only misty memories of the...

"Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart--he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone--but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees"--Provided by publisher....

During their first four years of marriage, Laura and Almanzo Wilder have a child and fight a losing battle in their attempts to succeed at farming on the South Dakota prairie.

After inheriting her uncle's homesteading claim in Montana, sixteen-year-old orphan Hattie Brooks travels from Iowa in 1917 to make a home for herself and encounters some unexpected problems related to the war being fought in Europe. Includes readers guide and a short interview with Kirby Larson following the bibliography.

When Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch arrive in Appaloosa, they find a small, dusty town suffering at the hands of renegade rancher Randall Bragg, a man who has so little regard for the law that he has taken supplies, horses, and women for his own and left the city marshal and one of his deputies for dead. Cole and Hitch, itinerant lawmen, are used to cleaning up after opportunistic thieves, but in Bragg they find an unusually wily adversary-one who...

Based on a true story of Northern Arizona's notorious Hashknife gang, Zane Grey's classic 1921 western novel tells the tale of Jean Isbel, a woodsman hailing from Oregon. Caught in a bitter feud between the Isbels and the cattle-rustling Jorths, Jean is dragged into a generations-long clash between the two families, both of whom have sworn to fight until no man on the other side is left standing. Amidst it all, Jean finds himself hopelessly in love...

Orphaned at thirteen, a mail-order bride at fourteen, widowed at sixteen, Sarah Kennedy has learned to depend upon no one but herself—reserving all her love for her younger brother Conner, and for the wounded hawks she heals and returns to the air.

A hardened Civil War veteran, personal tragedy has taught Case Maxwell three things: to be a patient, deadly fighter, to love nothing that can die; and that justice is blind. But when a confrontation

...