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Blood & Thunder (biography of Kit Carson) can't beat this one!

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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.

+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.

EE:

Don't forget Return to Lonesome Dove. Was that another book or just a movie seguel?

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.

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.

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.

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

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_Kelton

drover

Hard to beat right there.

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.

I can't remember who wrote it but Brules was very good!

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

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.