***2013 Spur Award Finalist, Best Western Short Novel When the McCandles’ Gang decides to shoot up Coalville, Idaho, it seems like a pretty easy hit. But among the survivors is a young man named Joseph Roper. Joey worked with Sheriff Hackett, and he was not about to let Ian McCandles get away with what he has done. This is the story of Joey’s search for justice, and the paths that that search took him on!

J. T. Latham is rotting in prison in the Yuma Territory penitentiary. But then Sheriff Del Buchman offers to commute his sentence if Latham helps execute a prisoner exchange with some dangerous banditos. The only catch is that he must guide the sheriff through the deadly Sonoran Desert.

The story was adapted from surviving transcripts of the American Legends Collection, which were written in 1936 as part of the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration.

It’s the early days of the Mexican revolution. J. T. Latham is about to be killed by a Yuma Prison gang when an old nemesis, Deputy Del Buchman, intervenes. Latham will get a pardon if he uses his knowledge of the area and his experience with the Yaqui to guide Buchman’s posse deep into the Sonoran desert to rescue rich man’s kidnapped wife and children. The guerrilla general responsible wants machine guns for their safe return, but there is more to the ransom than guns. The trail is bounded with danger, treachery and the question of mercy as Latham tries to outmaneuver the next chess move of his adversaries. Getting out of prison was easy, now Latham has to get out of the desert alive.

Wil Chama was interviewed in 1938 as a contributor to the American Legends Collection, a part of the Federal Writers’ Project. Speaking into an Edison Dictaphone he narrated the events of his life. His personal narrative included his involvement as a strike breaker in what became known as the Gunnison Affair.

It was as a result of this shameful episode that he gained his reputation as a gunman and sought to bury himself as a driver of a salt wagon in Rio Tinto, Texas. What Wil never suspected is that he was engaged to work for the Red Devil Salt Works in Rio Tinto not because of his skill as a muleskinner, but precisely because of his reputation as a gunman.

This becomes suddenly clear to Wil when Randall Kellums, the owner of the Red Devil, tells him he wants Wil to give up his job as a wagoner and instead serve notice on Amos Montoya that his company and his people will no longer have access to the salt deposits at Tinto Flats.

The Poacher’s Daughter is an extraordinary story of betrayal and redemption, set within an uncompromising landscape of raw brutality and unimaginable beauty. It is a novel you won’t soon forget.

In 1885 young Rose Edwards is widowed by Montana vigilantes who hang her husband for an alleged theft, then burn her Yellowstone Valley cabin to the ground as a warning for her and others of her kind to quit the territory. Penniless and illiterate, yet fiercely independent, Rose begins a two-year odyssey to revisit the land of her childhood, a land she once traveled with her father, an itinerant robe trader among the Assiniboines and Blackfeet. But the old ways of the hunter and trapper are disappearing as Europeans flood the ranges with vast herds of cattle.

With an aging roan gelding named Albert as her closest friend, Rose becomes a reluctant hero of an indigenous population, both native and white, as she stubbornly pushes back against the invading aristocracy.