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Campfire Ranger
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Campfire Ranger
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Undaunted Courage (about Louis & Clark)
Empire of the Summer Moon (about the rise and fall of the Comanche Nation)
Blood & Thunder (biography of Kit Carson)
Blood & Thunder (biography of Kit Carson) can't beat this one!
...Actually Sycamore, you are sort of right....
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Campfire Kahuna
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Ralph Cotton and Ralph Compton are both good authors also. And the Longarm Series is also good reading if you are looking for more adult type westerns.
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Campfire Outfitter
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I enjoyed reading the mountain man series from William W. Johnstone. +1, great books. I would imagine that your father would enjoy some of Steven Hunter's books. Havanna, Hot Springs, Dirty White Boys, Point of Impact and a few others. Very entertaining.
A true sportsman counts his achievements in proportion to the effort involved and fairness of the sport. - S. Pope
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The Lonesome Dove series is actually four books. Historically speaking, the begin with Dead Man's Walk, then there's Comanche Moon, Lonesome Dove and Streets of Laredo. At least that's the only four I'm aware of. I don't read much McMurtry anymore. EE: Don't forget Return to Lonesome Dove. Was that another book or just a movie seguel?
Wind in my hair, Sun on my face, I gazed at the wide open spaces, And I was at home.
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Campfire 'Bwana
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Campfire 'Bwana
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Undaunted Courage (about Louis & Clark)
Empire of the Summer Moon (about the rise and fall of the Comanche Nation)
Blood & Thunder (biography of Kit Carson)
Blood & Thunder (biography of Kit Carson) can't beat this one! I second this. An excellent book!!! Highly recommend. Currently I’m about half way thru, "The Life of George Bent". Another excellent book. Made from the letters of George Bent to a historian from 1904 to 1918. Bent was 1/2 Cheyenne 1/2 white son of William Bent (Bent’s Fort) and Owl Woman. He was a very educated man and his writng style is very good! If you are interested in the Indian wars of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska this is an awesome book. Full of primary documentation and first hand accounts. Bent was wounded in the hip during the Chivington raid at Sand Creek.
Last edited by kaywoodie; 06/16/20.
Founder Ancient Order of the 1895 Winchester
"Come, shall we go and kill us venison? And yet it irks me the poor dappled fools, Being native burghers of this desert city, Should in their own confines with forked heads Have their round haunches gored."
WS
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I'm part way through "Following the Guidon" by Elizabeth B. Custer (LTC Custer's wife), original edition 1890. Lots of good stuff about how the cavalry really was.
Don't blame me. I voted for Trump.
Democrats would burn this country to the ground, if they could rule over the ashes.
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Campfire Ranger
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As mentioned a couple timed above, the A.B. Guthrie series is a definite recommendation. Outstanding.
I just read In The Rogue Blood, by James Carlos Blake. It's a damn good book, but it's a bit rough.
Lots of folks recommend Blood Meridian, but personally I thought it was one of the worst books I've ever wasted my time reading.
MAGA
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Campfire Kahuna
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Campfire Kahuna
Joined: May 2016
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Was in Malta to pick up a new fridge yesterday. Went to the Museum to kill an hour. Malta/Phillips County has a FINE museum. Anyway....they had a selection of books to buy as well. I just spent a bunch on a fridge, so let this book go......but to a certain kind of person, I believe it would be a good one. Kinda pricey... https://www.amazon.com/Saddleries-Montana-Montanas-Makers-Territorial/dp/0764352741
I am MAGA.
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My Dad has read every old western book in his county library. The paperbacks all have different geezer initials all up and down the inside first page so they can see if they already read it. Clearly he needs new material for Father's Day.
Help me with a good western book or series about steely-eyed cowboys, slim-waisted rancher daughters, blazing Colt 45's and sidekicks named Blue. For the type of books you are looking for I recommend Elmer Kelton. He is a good writer, his stuff is above average for the genre you mentioned and he wrote a lot of books. If at all possible he should read them from the publishing date because some of his later books sometimes refer to incidents and characters in earlier books, although he is good enough as a writer that it is not necessary to have read the earlier books. Most of his stories are set in Texas in the time period prior to and through the civil war although they are not about the war itself. He wrote the book Good Old Boys it was made into a great movie with Tommy Lee Jones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmer_Keltondrover
223 Rem, my favorite cartridge - you can't argue with truckloads of dead PD's and gophers.
24hourcampfire.com - The site where there is a problem for every solution.
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Campfire Kahuna
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Campfire Kahuna
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The Lonesome Dove series is actually four books. Historically speaking, the begin with Dead Man's Walk, then there's Comanche Moon, Lonesome Dove and Streets of Laredo. At least that's the only four I'm aware of. I don't read much McMurtry anymore. Hard to beat right there.
"Allways speak the truth and you will never have to remember what you said before..." Sam Houston Texans, "We say Grace, We Say Mam, If You Don't Like it, We Don't Give a Damn!"
~Molɔ̀ːn Labé Skýla~
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The novels written by Luke Short were pretty good, he was an actual gunfighter of those days, so he knew what he was writing about.
You can roll a turd in peanuts, dip it in chocolate, and it still ain't no damn Baby Ruth.
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Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry is the best ever imho.
Dave I can't remember who wrote it but Brules was very good!
I tend to use more than enough gun
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Campfire Ranger
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Campfire Ranger
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As mentioned above. CJ Box.
Though not western. Still guns. Outdoors. Horses. Crime fighting.
You can get a stack of them off eBay for not tooo much.
Dave
�The man who complains about the way the ball bounces is likely to be the one who dropped it.� Lou Holtz
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Campfire Kahuna
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Campfire Kahuna
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The Lonesome Dove series is actually four books. Historically speaking, the begin with Dead Man's Walk, then there's Comanche Moon, Lonesome Dove and Streets of Laredo. At least that's the only four I'm aware of. I don't read much McMurtry anymore. EE: Don't forget Return to Lonesome Dove. Was that another book or just a movie seguel? I'm just doing this by memory so...IIRC, Return to Lonesome Dove was the first effort after Lonesome Dove and starred Jon Voight as Call and had Ricky Schroeder reprising his role as Newt. It also added some characters. As far as I know, it had nothing to do with McMurtry or any of his novels. SPOILER~McMurtry killed Newt off unceremoniously by having him thrown off or kicked in the head by a horse or mule. He didn't appear in the sequel to LD, Streets of Laredo. IIRC he was a minor character in Comanche Moon, a prequel. Dead Man's Walk was a prequel as well. There was also a TV series on Fox in the nineties called Lonesome Dove the Series. It didn't do too well evidently and lasted a year as that and then came back re-titled Lonesome Dove the Outlaw Years. Again, McMurtry had nothing to do with it and it took the character of Newt Dobbs, now called "Call" after his possible father Woodrow Call, and centered both series' around him. The second series or however you'd term it, lasted only another year. The second series is especially worth watching although again, McMurtry had already killed the character he created off in his books.
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Campfire Ranger
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I'm not paying Amazon 10 bucks or more for a slim western novel so I went down to the local used book store. I'd been there before, it's not a well traveled place, musty and crammed full of books everywhere. The owner and I had a brief conversation about wearing a mask and she declared her constitutional rights and the fact that the straps jack up her new hearing aids. Fine by me, I agreed with her. She looks like Edgar Winter , but a very nice and helpful eccentric bookworm.
I went through the stacks and ended up with:
5 Will Johnstone 3 JT Edsen 1 McMurtry 2 Ralph Cotton 2 Luke Short 4 Elmer Kelton
Bonus find: Shane by Jack Shaefer. The book they based the movie on. Got to hurry up and finish it before Father's Day. It's a good book.
Thanks for the help!
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Another plug for C.J. Box, especially the Joe Picket series, also his Lizard King series. These are particularly good as audio books, the narrator does a fantastic job. They are sort of modern westerns set in the Northern Rockies.
~Molɔ̀ːn Labé Skýla~
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All the praise for Mcmurtry reminded me The lone L M book I have is Cadillac Jack Not a western, but a pretty good book
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A great "Eastern" is "The Frontiersmen" by Allan W. Eckert. Great audio book if you prefer. European/Indian conflict in earlier times when the eastern area was the untamed west of the day.
~Molɔ̀ːn Labé Skýla~
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