Lauran Paine

"Two western stories: The Valley of Thunder finds Marshal Hugh Mitchel trying to make the streets of Dunningan, Wyoming, safe despite opposition from ranch owners who are unwilling to have restraints imposed on their men. The Story of Buckhorn is the story of a Dakota cattle ranch and the two brothers who are maintaining its legacy"--

Jackson Miggs was a loner who wintered under the Ute Peak in his log cabin. He liked people well enough, but didn't care much for crowds. He even tolerated the cowmen like Hyatt Tolman who used the high meadows around Ute Peak to graze his herd-even when the animals cropped the forage too closely and drove the elk and deer into the higher mountains. Miggs once told Frank McCoy that if he looked out a window and saw a building less than two hundred...

Samuel Patton lost his wife to lung fever two years ago. Now, suffering from lung fever himself and closer to eternity every day, he is traveling south through the mountains with his small son and daughter, hoping somewhere in this savage land he can find a good home for them before time runs out. When the two kids find an unconscious man, the three tend to his wounds, care for his horse, and load him into their wagon. Samuel finds a cache of money...

It was spring on the Llano Estacado, the Staked Plains of Texas, the time for the cattle drives to push north to the rail heads in Kansas. The "Lost Cause" of the South was still fresh in the mind of Southerners, including fifty-five-year-old Ben Albright, a pioneer of the Texas cattle drives, who was well familiar with the trail and its dangers-he had successfully made five cattle drives from Texas to Kansas, but this spring will be his most difficult....

A feud between the biggest and richest cattleman, Richard DeFore, and the local stage line couldn't have come at a worse time to Winchester, Colorado. The town's new sheriff, John Klinger, young, inexperienced, and hot-headed, hasn't been in the job for a month yet, when DeFore, who has never sold or donated the right of way for the pass which is on his land, demands the stage line pay a toll for passage, which the company is refusing to do. Luckily,...

Kit Butler and Lige Turner are weathered trackers-trappers who once lived among the Dakota people as brothers, learning their language, their land, and their way of life. Now, with the fur trade dwindling, they find themselves guides for a wagon train-a group of emigrants leaving behind the comforts of the world they know for the Wild West. The problem is, they have to pass through hostile Dakota Indian territory to reach their destination.The members...

Five days ago, the blowing up of the express office safe in Burnt Timbers, Montana, had gone off without a hitch for the four members of the Buck Streeter gang, netting them $28,000. Since then they have taken refuge in an abandoned shack on a plateau above the town of Brigham in northern Wyoming. With its bank and express office across the street from each other and lacking any telegraph for communication, Brigham seems like the perfect place to...

The trouble began for Sheriff Claude Rainey when the Hightower Ranch cowboys discovered a mummified man and his horse in a desert canyon near Springville, Arizona-both shot in the head. Ordinarily that should have been the end of it. Few men riding the outlaw trail up out of Mexico make it through that godforsaken country. What troubled Rainey and the townsmen, however, was what Hightower foreman Al Trail had brought into town and given to the sheriff. Near...

"Ryan Shanley, a former Union soldier, starts a new life in Wyoming Territory unprepared for the struggles he will face, but determined to build the ranch of his dreams"--