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Recommended Reading

An ambitious and daring young man, Sam Morgan leaves his home in 1820s Pennsylvania to seek adventure and fortune in the frontier West, accompanied by a colorful assortment of companions he meets along the way.

Gabriel is a young black man who moves reluctantly from the urban North with his mother and younger brother to join his stepfather, a homesteader in Kansas. When he runs away to become a cowboy, his search for excitement brings trouble and danger.

An Indian request in 1854 for one thousand white brides to ensure peace is secretly approved by the U.S. government in this alternate-history novel. The brides’ journey west is described by May Dodd, a high-society woman released from an asylum where she was incarcerated by her family for having an affair.

His life turned upside-down by the deaths of his children from smallpox and the desertion of his Nez Perce wife, Hudson’s Bay Company trader James MacLaren joins a group of settlers headed west to Oregon in 1847.

A member of Brigham Young’s inner circle, John D. Lee holds a high position in the Mormon church until he is held accountable for the Mountain Meadows Massacre in which 120 settlers are slaughtered by a group of Mormons and their Indian allies.

A fictional chronicle centered around the fall of the Alamo provides a dramatic re-creation of an event that shaped the history and identity of Texas.

Carina Maria DeGratia’s hopes for a new life in a rough Colorado mining town are complicated by two men who compete for her love and trust, each hiding a secret.

The hardships, tragedy and devastating starvation that confronted the Donner Party, which became trapped by winter snows in the Sierra Nevadas, are seen through the eyes of James Frazier Reed and his eight-year-old daughter, Patty.

In 1816, Mordecai Lewis, a veteran of Andrew Jackson’s Indian campaigns, moves his family into the western Tennessee canebrakes. Not satisfied with farming, he leads his two sons and a few other backwoodsmen into Spanish-held Texas to hunt wild horses and return the herd to sell in Tennessee.

It’s 1832, and Lord and Lady Berrybender — wealthy Brits incongruously venturing into the Wild West — make their way up the Missouri River with several of their children, including Tasmin, a gutsy, industrious young woman.

Arriving in a small nineteenth-century western town where the sheriff has been killed and the residents are at the mercy of a renegade rancher, lawmen Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch face an adversary who works by playing psychological games.

In 1881, Sarah Agnes Prine, 17, goes from New Mexico to Texas and back, protecting her family with her rifle, and then becoming ranch manager while her second husband serves as a Texas ranger.

The history of the west unfolds in 28 original stories written especially for this unique collection commemorating the 50th anniversary of Western Writers of America, Inc.