Dramatized Westerns

During a trip back east for a family reunion, Preacher learns that even the civilized Midwest can attract a motherlode of trouble...especially when a gang of local bully boys decide to pick a fight. Now wealthy landowner Elam Parks lies dead - and there's a $5,000 reward on the head of the man accused: the first mountain man. The fortune in blood money has dispatched a small army of bounty hunters after Preacher. Now, back in his once-peaceful homestead in the High Lonesome, as he sights down the barrel of his '33 Hall North breechloader, Preacher is ready for target practice.

They just wanted to get home for Christmas...but fate had other plans. It's December 1890. A Texas rancher named Big Jim Conyers has a deal with Scottish-born, Wyoming cattleman named Duff MacCallister. Along with Smoke and Matt Jensen, the party bears down on Dodge, Kansas, to make a cattle drive back to Forth Worth. But before they can get out of Dodge, guns go off and a rich man's son is killed.

On nothing more than a lark, he leaves his family and begins a journey from Ohio westward. Along the way, he runs up against badlands and bad men, loses his freedom, gains his freedom and learns the first rule of the frontier: do whatever it takes to survive. With ruthless enemies after him - both white men and Indians - he’ll head for a place as brutal as it is beautiful - the wilderness of the Rocky Mountains. Two years later, he will come back down from the mountaintop with new skills and a new future as one of the most feared and admired men of his time...a man called Preacher.

A Comanche war party raids settlements and steals horses. A young warrior named Buffalo Caller kills a young couple, then abducts their red-haired little boy. The boy is rescued by a volunteer defender of the white settlers named Mike Shannon, who raises the boy as his own and calls him Rusty.

Orphaned at the age of seven and adopted by Indians, Jami Ian MacCallister grew into a man more at ease in the wilderness than among men. But when the westward strike drove him across the Arkansas Territory into Texas, he finally found himself a home — in the middle of a bloody war. Texans like Jim Bowie and Sam Houston were waging a fierce struggle against Santa Ana’s Mexican army and Jami MacCallister made the perfect scout for the fledgling volunteer force. What lay ahead of them was a place called the Alamo, 13 days of blood, dust, and courage.

Werewolf by Max Brand in Western Story Magazine (12/18/26) involves just such an inward journey for Christopher Royal, who is convinced he is a coward and flees a confrontation with Harry Main, who is a gunfighter. There comes a time in this story - when Christopher encounters the aged Indian, the old wise man - that the terrain shimmers with the multiple affinities of meaning conjured by the unconscious, which Vergil once sought to capture within an image both awesome and sinister: numina magna deum [the great divine power of a god].

They call him Preacher. And they call him when they need help. Now, a Mexican brother and sister have asked the legendary frontiersman to accompany them into the Sangre de Cristo mountains - to find a missing family fortune of gold and silver. In a land stained by cruelty and war, the Spanish treasure has drawn the interest of a treasure hunter with ruthless paid killers as his partners. And by the time Preacher finds the bounty, bullets have begun to fly. No gunfight will ever scare Preacher. But betr

The Sante Fe Trail stretches from the Mississippi River to New Mexico Territory through the West's most savage lands. That's why a wealthy trader hires the mountain man called Preacher to keep his trade goods safe. But then, a towering, seemingly supernatural grizzly bear attacks. Both outlaws and Comanches ambush the wagon train. And the travelers find themselves surrounded by predators of every shape and stripe. For Preacher, there is only one way to go - straight into the heart of danger, to blaze a killing trail of his own....

This latest installment in Johnstone's series about frontiersman Jamie MacCallister finds the former gunfighter, now 50, leading a serene life of retirement in Colorado even as his sons are fighting on both sides of the Civil War. Summoned to Washington, Jamie is offered the position of chief scout for the Union by Lincoln himself. But though the rugged Westerner loathes slavery, he loves states' rights more and, after a meeting with Robert E. Lee, he signs up with the Confederacy as commander of a guerrilla band.

In the bustling streets of St. Louis, two cousins have a dream: to travel west with a wagon train of supplies and make a fortune in trade. Preacher needs a job and is heading west anyway. But he doesn't bargain on the beautiful woman who sneaks her way into the wagon train and the trouble she brings on board.

Frank Morgan has one son he knows of - and Kid Morgan has become famous in his own right. But in Montana, Frank comes face-to-face with a young man with a deadly swagger and a stunning claim: that he's Frank's son, too. And he's here to gun his old man down. For Frank, the first thing to do is find out if Brady Morgan is truly his own flesh and blood. That means tracking down a woman he once loved, and then untangling her lies, lust and a scheme to steal prime Montana ranch land.

It is the fall of 1867. Twenty-two years have passed since Tim Colter and his family were ambushed on the Oregon Trail, forcing the young boy to grow up, forge ahead, and find an unlikely ally in one-eyed mountain man Jed Reno. Now a widowed deputy, US marshal, and Civil War veteran, Colter is finally ready to remarry and settle down - until a dangerous new assignment becomes a life-or-death struggle for the soul of a town and the heart of its people....

When Conrad Browning's wife disappears in the untamed frontier, Conrad finds himself assuming the identity of his famous gunslinging father, Frank Morgan, to find her. But his hopes of rescuing Rebel are swiftly shattered - and now he's burning for vengeance, the old-fashioned way. So he fakes his own death and starts calling himself The Loner, becoming the deadliest gunfighter this side of his own father - ready to settle the score in blood and bullets....

Scream of Eagles is the fourth book in William W. Johnstone’s epic saga of the MacCallister clan, a family caught up in the vivid sweep of American history. Jamie Ian MacCallister has survived the bloodshed of the Alamo and the Civil War. Now the battle has gotten personal: Jamie is on a one-man vendetta against the Miles Nelson gang, the men responsible for the brutal murder of his wife Kate. His journey of revenge will take him from Atlantic City to the deadly landscape of the Colorado Rockies - and finally to the Battle of Little Big Horn.

Preacher, against his better judgment, agrees to lead a wagon train of women across the West. He hires a pack of mountain men to assist him, but he gets more than he bargained for when a gang of cutthroats follows the train with murder, rape and slave trafficking in mind. Led by the nefarious Easterner Victor Bedell, the outlaws will accomplish what few have done before: they will get a bullet into Preacher. But they’ll make a fatal mistake. They’ll leave him for dead. Soon the mountains will echo with avenging gunfire.

Joey Wells has a score to settle in Pueblo: Find Jacob Murdock and the band of vaqueros who attacked his wife and drown them in their own stinking blood. Smoke Jensen, the trigger-ready legend of the "High Lonesome," is more than willing to strap on a brace of 45's to help out Wells - especially if it involves nailing some dirty renegades to the wall. But things are tougher than Jensen imagined. Murdock and his men aren't just hiding out in Pueblo - they've taken it over.

The gold-mining town of Red Light, Montana is the kind of backwater hole less famous for the folks that live there than the ones who die there - like Janey Jensen, Smoke Jensen's sister. Smoke never would have gone there if it hadn't been for her estate. But that isn't the only thing the Mountain Man's got to settle. There's also the score between him and Major Cosgrove. The man who owns Red Light - lock, stock and barrel - is six feet of trouble looking for somebody like Smoke to bring out the worst in him.

When Harry French left home he was just another kid looking to make his way. But when he comes back four years later, things are different. He's different. Or at least the town thinks so. Now nobody looks him in the eye. He isn't just Harry anymore, he's the Shifter, a gunfighter who brings trouble with him wherever he goes. And as hard as Harry tries, he finds that a reputation is a lot harder to put down than a gun.

It was a virgin land of vast horizons...a land of dreams and dust and blood, where men sought glory and hope died hard. But for Jamie Ian MacCallister, who'd grown to manhood among Indians and fought at the Alamo, war and wilderness were home...and survival was a way of life. From the battlegrounds of Texas to the Colorado Rockies and the goldfields of California, Jamie MacCallister was one of a handful of daring pioneers blazing trails in the American West.

When Big Max Huggins, the outlaw leader of a nearby cutthroat town, tries to impose his influence on Barlow, Smoke Jensen promptly sends the gang packing, but they retaliate by kidnapping his wife, and Smoke must save her as well as the town.