Hoppy, Lucky, and California ride into an adventure that includes a stampede, a prairie fire, saloon fights, cattle rustling and stagecoach holdups.

The Wild West looms large in the artistic imagination, and has left an indelible mark on the history of cinema. However, unbeknownst to many, lots of the most famous Western films started out as stories. In this anthology, then, we have collected those tales which later found their way onto the silver screen. Including 'Hopalong Cassidy', 'The Cisco Kid', 'The Virginian' and many more.

Screenplay of the Hopalong Cassidy film that was released in 1935. Includes some hand-written notes.

Hopalong Cassidy has received a message from the dead. Answering an urgent appeal for help from fellow cowpuncher Pete Melford, he rides in only to discover that his old friend has been murdered and the ranch Pete left to his niece, Cindy Blair, has vanished without a trace. Hopalong may have arrived too late to save Pete, but his sense of loyalty and honor demands that he find that cold-blooded killers and return to Cindy what is rightfully hers. Colonel Justin Tredway, criminal kingpin of the town of Kachina, is the owner of the sprawling Box T ranch, and he has built his empire with a shrewd and ruthless determination. In search of Pete’s killers and Cindy’s ranch, Hopalong signs on at the Box T, promising to help get Tredway’s wild cattle out of the rattler-infested brush. But in the land of mesquite and black chaparral, Cassidy confronts a mystery as hellish as it is haunting—a bloody trail that leads to the strange and forbidding Babylon plateau, to $60,000 in stolen gold, and to a showdown with an outlaw who has already cheated death once . . . and is determined to do it again.

In Europe the war was already old, but while feeding nickels into roadhouse jukeboxes, the Presidential conventions, where the biggest question would be whether That Man in the White House would shatter yet another precedent and run for a third term. To many Americans, there seemed little else worth worrying about. As with all time periods, the 1940s had a set of specific fads that were popular around the country. Read this book and find out about the films of this decade and more...