The Cimarron country has it all! Indian, mountain man, and pioneer legends. Cowboy and ranching tales. Stagecoach and early railroad adventures. Gold fever! Heroes and villains. Hangings and outlaws. Corporate greed. Overwhelming individual generosity. Struggles and triumphs. This volume highlights some of the important places and events that occurred in the Cimarron country. Its history is a treasure trove of heroic examples and valuable lessons for all of us to learn. Dozens of rare historical photos and illustrations bring these stories to life.

The Cimarron country has it all! Indian, mountain man, and pioneer legends. Cowboy and ranching tales. Stagecoach and early railroad adventures. Gold fever! Heroes and villains. Hangings and outlaws. Corporate greed. Overwhelming individual generosity. Struggles and triumphs. This volume highlights some of the important places and events that occurred in the Cimarron country. Its history is a treasure trove of heroic examples and valuable lessons for all of us to learn. Dozens of rare historical photos and illustrations bring these stories to life.

Situated where the High Plains meet the Rocky Mountains and where the Santa Fe Trail crosses the Cimarron River, the village of Cimarrón has a richly varied history. Spectacular rock columns, thick seams of coal, dinosaur footprints, pit houses, and petroglyphs echo an early geologic and human presence. Spanish explorers encountered area Native American settlements in the 1700s, and by the 1820s, mountain men roamed these Rockies while eastern merchants followed Indian trails to Santa Fe. By the 1860s, Cimarrón was the headquarters of a vast Mexican land grant managed by Lucien Maxwell and Kit Carson. A gristmill supplied local soldiers and Indians, and the discovery of gold attracted thousands. The Colfax County War erupted after speculators purchased the grant in 1870. When the railroad arrived in 1906, a "New Town" was built on the north side of the river. Today, through tourism and the Philmont Scout Ranch, the Cimarrón area offers a unique window into the history and growth of the West.

The Spanish word cimarron, meaning “wild” or “untamed,” refers to a region in the southern Rocky Mountains where control of timber, gold, coal, and grazing lands long bred violent struggle. After the U.S. occupation following the 1846–1848 war with Mexico, this tract of nearly two million acres came to be known as the Maxwell Land Grant. WhenCimarron Meant Wild presents a new history of the collision that occurred over the region’s resources between 1870 and 1900. Author David L. Caffey describes the epic late-nineteenth-century range war in an account deeply informed by his historical perspective on social, political, and cultural issues that beset the American West to this day. Cimarron country churned with the tensions of the Old West—land disputes, lawlessness, violence, and class war among miners, a foreign corporation, local elites, Texas cattlemen, and the haughty “Santa Fe Ring” of lawyerly speculators. And present, still, were the indigenous Jicarilla Apache and Mouache Ute people, dispossessed of their homeland by successive Spanish, Mexican, and American regimes. A Mexican grant of uncertain size and bounds, awarded to Carlos Beaubien and Guadalupe Miranda in 1841 and later acquired by Lucien Maxwell, marked the beginning of a fight for control of the land and set off overlapping conflicts known as the Colfax County War, the Maxwell Land Grant War, and the Stonewall War. Caffey draws on new research to paint a complex picture of these events, and of those that followed the sale of the claim to investors in 1870. These clashes played out over the following thirty years, involving the new English owners, miners and prospectors, livestock grazers and farmers, and Native Americans. Just how wild was the Cimarron country in the late 1800s? And what were the consequences for the region and for those caught up in the conflict? The answers, pursued through this remarkable work, enhance our understanding of cultural and economic struggle in the American West.

Catherine Whitfield is sure that she will never again be able to trust anyone in the medical profession after the town doctor's excessive bleeding treatments killed her mother. Despite her loneliness and her broken heart, she carries bravely on as Cimarron Creek's dutiful schoolteacher, resigned to a life without love or family, a life where dreams rarely come true. Austin Goddard is a newcomer to Cimarron Creek. Posing as a rancher, he fled to Texas to protect his daughter from a dangerous criminal. He's managed to keep his past as a surgeon a secret. But when Catherine Whitfield captures his heart, he wonders how long he will be able to keep up the charade. With a deft hand, Amanda Cabot teases out the strands of love, deception, and redemption in this charming tale of dreams deferred and hopes becoming reality.

Texas attorney Billy Bob Holland must confront the past in order to save his illegitimate son from a murder conviction in this brilliant, fast-paced thriller from beloved New York Times bestselling author James Lee Burke. Lucas Smothers, nineteen and from the wrong end of town, has been arrested for the rape and murder of a local girl. His lawyer, former Texas Ranger Billy Bob Holland, is convinced of Lucas’s innocence—but proving it means unearthing the truth from the seething mass of deceit and corruption that spreads like wildfire in a gossipy small town where everybody knows everybody else’s business. Billy Bob’s relationship with Lucas’s family is not an easy one. Years back he was a close friend of Mrs. Smothers—too close, according to her husband. But when Lucas overhears gruesome tales of serial murder from a neighboring cell in the local lock-up, he himself looks like a candidate for an untimely death, and Billy Bob incurs enemies far more dangerous than any he faced as a Ranger. With the same electric language and hard-edged style that brought James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux novels to the forefront of American crime fiction, Cimarron Rose explodes with a harsh, evocative setting and unforgettable characters.

From afar, Cimarron Creek seems like an idyllic town tucked in the Texas Hill Country. But when former schoolteacher Lydia Crawford steps onto its dusty streets in 1880, she finds a town with a deep-seated resentment of Northerners--like her. Lydia won't let that get her down, though. All will be well when she's reunited with her fiancé. But when she discovers he has disappeared--and that he left behind a pregnant wife--Lydia is at a loss about what to do next. The handsome sheriff urges her to trust him, but can she trust anyone in this town where secrets are as prevalent as bluebonnets in spring? Bestselling author Amanda Cabot invites readers back into Texas's storied past to experience love and adventure against a backdrop of tension and mystery in this first book in a brand-new series.