The cowboys, gold miners, outlaws, gunmen, prostitutes, and marshals who populate the Wild West never see much big-city entertainment. Those Western towns are too wild and rowdy for entertainers to enter, let alone perform in them. All that is about change. August Beausoleil and his colleague, Charles Pomerantz, have taken the Beausoleil Brothers Follies to the remote mining towns of Montana, far from the powerful impresarios who own the talent and control the theaters on the big vaudeville circuits. Their cast includes a collection of has-beens and second-tier performers: Mary Mabel Markey, once queen of the boards but now a little out of breath; Wayne Windsor, “The Profile,” who favors his audiences with just one side of his face while needling them with acerbic dialogue; Harry the Juggler, who went from tossing teacups to tossing scimitars; Mrs. McGivers and her capuchin monkey band; and the Wildroot Sisters, born to show business and managed by a stage mother who drives August mad. Though the towns are starved for entertainment, the Follies struggles to fill seats as it grinds from town to town. Just when the company is desperate for fresh talent, a mysterious young woman astonishes everyone with her exquisite voice. The Wild West will never be the same. They’ve seen comics, gorgeous singers, scimitar-tossing jugglers. Now if the troupers can only make it back East . . . alive! RICHARD S. WHEELER is the author of more than fifty novels of the American West. He holds six Spur Awards and the Owen Wister Award for lifetime contribution to the literature of the West. He makes his home in Livingston, Montana, near Yellowstone National Park.

Gladstone Brass found out how to make his livelihood during the thirty years he prospected the arid wastes of the Nevada desert. He pried ore out of the few small deposits he discovered, then went to town–which he hated–only long enough to trade his bits of gold for the supplies he needed. Otherwise, he was devoted to keeping these arid, secret wastes all to himself, and that meant driving out rivals, invaders, interlopers, and adventurers. His only friend and companion was Tia Maria, a burro he’d caught in a desert canyon after his mule died from a snake bite. His great enemy was Bitter Bowler, a younger man, but run-down and dishonest.

One day, Brass spotted buzzards circling, and curiosity led him to investigate. He found a dead burro and an injured Bitter Bowler with his revolver trained on Brass. Bowler claimed he had broken his leg and couldn’t move. He wanted Brass’ water. When Brass refused, Bowler shot Tia Maria, then told him the next shot would be for him if he didn’t leave his water and supplies and get more water and something he could use for a crutch. Brass agreed and headed for Angel Cliff seep, the nearest water supply. He was debating whether he should go back to rescue Bitter Bowler when he arrived at the seep to find a stranger camped there who immediately turned, his gun pointed right at Brass.

Life hasn’t always been easy for March and Kermit McPhee, but things are looking up. March gives birth to a healthy son, and their small gold mine is looking better and better as Kermit blasts his way along a good seam of ore. Then Kermit is crushed by a cave-in.As soon as her husband dies, crooks are at March’s door, eager to get their hands on the mine. The peaceful town of Marysville, Montana, is peaceful no more. March’s home is burned and her baby killed. Terrified and threatened, she is targeted by the wealthy and powerful. March fights back every way she can. She discovers she has allies: a saloon man named Tipperary Leary, an assayer named Rolf Wittgenstein, and a slippery lawyer named Hermes Apollo. Still, March must ask herself whether it is worth it; whether a gold mine, or wealth of any sort, should be defended at such a price.

“He thought that this was why he’d become a newsman. Yes. A paper’s principle purpose was to report the news and earn a profit, but once in a while, a paper could become a beacon, a lantern, a bonfire for the good.”—from the book

It’s 1877, and all over the West, frontier towns have sprung up, drawing those in search of new beginnings after the Civil War. The young community of Payday is a paradise of rolling meadows and balmy skies, with a quiet population of ranchers and merchants. Into this Eden comes young editor Sam Flint, whose fledgling newspaper, The Payday Pioneer, earns him friends within the town and trumpets Payday’s glories throughout the West.

Sure enough, The Payday Pioneer lures settlers to the town. But to Sam’s dismay, they are settlers of the wrong kind. Soon Flint finds himself in the middle of an all-out war for control of the town. Perfect Payday is in danger. But Sam Flint will put his life on the line for what he believes in.

Sam Flint is a dedicated frontier journalist whose only weapon is the truth. But when he pulls into Silver City to set up his crusading weekly newspaper, he fears he’s made a mistake. The overpopulated town is being run into the ground by the corrupt editor of the Silver City Democrat, Digby Westminster. A friend of merchants and flatterer of politicians, the manipulative scoundrel has grown fat ridiculing the miners and working girls while making sure they are ruthlessly taxed into destitution.

Flint believes strongly that an honest journalist must challenge the Democrat. But how can he launch his own paper when the whole town is in his rival’s pocket?

Golden Spur Award–winning author Richard S. Wheeler continues his popular series featuring frontier journalist Sam Flint with Flint’s Truth, a tale of corruption and cover-up set against he vibrant backdrop of the American West.

An editor is popular only if he can keep a secret, and Sam Flint’s new home of Oro Blanco has more than its share. Flint chooses this small frontier town, the site of the richest gold strike in the New Mexico Territory, to launch his newest weekly newspaper, the Oro Blanco Nugget. As soon as he hits town, however, Flint can tell that something is not right, as the atmosphere in Oro Blanco is thick with signs of corruption and injustice. With all trails leading to the big mining bosses, Flint prepares to do battle for the truth, while defending his newspaper and his life.

In this powerful biographical novel, Richard Wheeler– winner of the Owen Wister Lifetime Achievement Award and five Spur Awards– tells the amazing tale of the American explorer and hero, John Fremont, and his attempt to find a railway route to the west along the 38th parallel. Trapped in the snowbound Colorado mountains, Fremont must fight his way out. He battles the frigid elements in a harrowing journey over the backbone of the continent. In this tale of desperate danger and fierce courage, Wheeler presents the reader with a survival saga par excellence– a struggle of man against man, man against nature, man against himself– and a novel you will never forget.

Collected here are ten Western short stories by Richard S. Wheeler, the award-winning author who makes storytelling look easy.

In “Mugs Birdsong’s Crime Academy,” celebrated criminal Mugs Birdsong decides to found an academy that will instruct lawmen on the ways and means of lawlessness. “The Last Days of Dominic Prince” is the tragic tale of a cattle baron and his final conflict with the forces of political correctness. “Dead Weight” introduces us to a coffin maker who constructs a work of art. And in the title story, two young men in the gold fields of California spend one last night together as one of them confronts his own imminent death.

This collection also includes “The Square Reporter,” “A Commercial Proposition,” “The Great Filibuster of 1975,” “The Tinhorn’s Lady,” “Hearts,” and “Looking for Love at a Romance Writers Convention.”

Two young men in the gold fields of California spend a last evening together as one of them, very sick, confronts his own imminent death. The tenderness between them may seem idealized, but you understand reading this story how premature death from accident and disease haunted the lives of far more westerners than death by violence.

Richard Wheeler has amassed a considerable fan base for his popular Barnaby Skye novels. An English exile, mountain man Skye agrees to lead a wagon train of consumptives to a desert locale-and faces all manner of danger along the way. “Wheeler’s lucid prose and excellent eye for detail make history come alive once again.”-Publishers Weekly