It’s a battle of the sexes in the Arkansas backwoods! When Skye Fargo rescues a maiden in distress in the wilds of the Ozark Mountains, he finds himself caught in the age-old battle of the sexes. Ever since a meddling schoolmarm from back east started educating the mountain folk out of their backwoods ways, the Jackson clan has been at war with itself, the men and women suddenly turned against each other. But as Fargo uncovers more about the feud, he suspects that some scheming sidewinder wants the war to drag on until all the Jackson have been buried in the family plot—with the Trailsman alongside them.

Danger awaits Fargo in a haunted canyon… In a rugged corner of Arizona, Skye Fargo saves old-timer Bert Olmsted from a flying bullet. But the disgruntled shooter doesn’t plan on letting Fargo—or Bert and his pretty granddaughters—leave town without spilling some of their blood. Determined to make their fortune in Skeleton Canyon, Bert and his girls refuse to be bullied by some bloodthirsty critter. They agree to Fargo’s protection, but what the Trailsman doesn’t know is that a gun-toting bully is the least of their troubles. The Apaches believe Skeleton Canyon is haunted—and would rather scalp some innocents than see gold-diggers stir up the dead. Now, if Fargo isn’t careful, the canyon could wind up hosting a few more ghosts…

Vance Randolph was perfectly constituted for his role as the chronicler of Ozark folkways. As a self-described “hack writer,” he was as much a figure of the margins as his chosen subjects, even as his essentially romantic identification with the region he first visited as the vacationing child of mainstream parents was encouraged by editors and tempered by his scientific training. In The Ozarks, originally published in 1931, we have Randolph’s first book-length portrait of the people he would spend the next half-century studying. The full range of Randolph’s interests—in language, in hunting and fishing, in folksongs and play parties, in moonshining—is on view in this book that made his name; forever after he was “Mr. Ozark,” the region’s preeminent expert who would, in collection after collection, enlarge and deepen his debut effort. With a new introduction by Robert Cochran, The Ozarks is the second entry in the Chronicles of the Ozarks series, a reprint series that will make available some of the Depression Era’s Ozarks books. An image shaper in its day, a cultural artifact for decades to come, this wonderful book is as entertaining as ever.

Winner of the Missouri History Book Award, from the State Historical Society of Missouri Winner of the Arkansiana Award, from the Arkansas Library Association Geologic forces raised the Ozarks. Myth enshrouds these hills. Human beings shaped them and were shaped by them. The Ozarks reflect the epic tableau of the American people—the native Osage and would-be colonial conquerors, the determined settlers and on-the-make speculators, the endless labors of hardscrabble farmers and capitalism of visionary entrepreneurs. The Old Ozarks is the first volume of a monumental three-part history of the region and its inhabitants. Brooks Blevins begins in deep prehistory, charting how these highlands of granite, dolomite, and limestone came to exist. From there he turns to the political and economic motivations behind the eagerness of many peoples to possess the Ozarks. Blevins places these early proto-Ozarkers within the context of larger American history and the economic, social, and political forces that drove it forward. But he also tells the varied and colorful human stories that fill the region's storied past—and contribute to the powerful myths and misunderstandings that even today distort our views of the Ozarks' places and people. A sweeping history in the grand tradition, A History of the Ozarks, Volume 1: The Old Ozarks is essential reading for anyone who cares about the highland heart of America.

The Ozarks of the mid-1800s was a land of divisions. The uplands and its people inhabited a geographic and cultural borderland straddling Midwest and west, North and South, frontier and civilization, and secessionist and Unionist. As civil war raged across the region, neighbor turned against neighbor, unleashing a generation of animus and violence that lasted long after 1865. The second volume of Brooks Blevins's history begins with the region's distinctive relationship to slavery. Largely unsuitable for plantation farming, the Ozarks used enslaved persons on a smaller scale or, in some places, not at all. Blevins moves on to the devastating Civil War years where the dehumanizing, personal nature of Ozark conflict was made uglier by the predations of marching armies and criminal gangs. Blending personal stories with a wide narrative scope, he examines how civilians and soldiers alike experienced the war, from brutal partisan warfare to ill-advised refugee policies to women's struggles to safeguard farms and stay alive in an atmosphere of constant danger. The war stunted the region's growth, delaying the development of Ozarks society and the processes of physical, economic, and social reconstruction. More and more, striving uplanders dedicated to modernization fought an image of the Ozarks as a land of mountaineers and hillbillies hostile to the idea of progress. Yet the dawn of the twentieth century saw the uplands emerge as an increasingly uniform culture forged, for better and worse, in the tumult of a conflicted era.