Tangling with rustlers, bank robbers and road agents is all in a day's work for Texas Ranger J.S. Turnbo as he fights to bring law and order to the area around Abilene and San Angelo, Texas. But solving a deadly mystery will put Turnbo's life in more danger than ever before.

In the Pacific Northwest, the river of dominance is the Columbia, and in ways both profound and mundane its history is the history of the region. In Great River of the West historians and anthropologists consider a range of topics about the river, from Indian rock art, Chinook Jargon, and ethnobotany on the Columbia to literary and family history, the creation of an engineered river, and the inherent mythic power of place. Since first contact between Euro-Americans and Native peoples during the late 18th century, the river's history has been characterized by dramatic demographic, social, and economic changes. The remarkable set of essays in Great River of the West investigate these changes by highlighting important episodes in the history of the river. Readers meet mariners who challenge the Columbia River bar, a family torn by insanity, Native people who preserve fishing traditions, and dam-builders who radically change the Columbia.

The mighty Columbia River cuts a deep gash through the Miocene basalts of the Columbia Plateau, coursing as well through the lives of the Indians who live along its banks. Known to these people as Nch’i-Wana (the Big River), it forms the spine of their land, the core of their habitat. At the turn of the century, the Sahaptin speakers of the mid-Columbia lived in an area between Celilo Falls and Priest Rapids in eastern Oregon and Washington. They were hunters and gatherers who survived by virtue of a detailed, encyclopedic knowledge of their environment. Eugene Hunn’s authoritative study focuses on Sahaptin ethnobiology and the role of the natural environment in the lives and beliefs of their descendants who live on or near the Yakima, Umatilla, and Warm Springs reservations.

Dramatizes the experiences of Huck Finn and Jim, a runaway slave, as they travel down the Mississippi River.

In Tombstone, Arizona Territory, the town too tough to die, Dr. George Goodfellow is known as the Surgeon to the Gunfighters. Friends with the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday, his services as a doctor are needed in the aftermath of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, but Goodfellow is handy with a gun and his fists, too, and he needs those skills to survive when he's stalked by a crazed miner and has to untangle a deadly murder mystery!

The River is the Mississippi, enigmatic and treacherous. The Man is the American who conquered the West--the prototype of the restless, innocent and greedy nineteenth century dreamers who built the railroads and steamboats, who opened the Santa Fe Trail and despoiled the forests, who fought the Indians and each other. Here is the American Myth brought to life though men and women who matched the robust, ruthless age in which they lived. Caleb McSwasey dreamed of creating an empire in the wilderness. He ruled men but could not rule the woman of his choice. By guile and ruthlessness, Jim Buckmaster, the river hog carved a vast fortune out of virgin timber. He owned the river but not his conscience. Rolfe Torkelsen, heir to the river's treasure, finally balked at the price he would have to pay. A new era had begun. But the dark magic of one woman (there are many in this book) proved more powerful than any river hog or lumber baron. Esperanza von Zumwalt, in whom the blood of three races was fused in crucible, dominated two strong men, one who loved her and one who hated her. These are a few of the tall Americans in Thomas W. Duncan's prodigious novel of adventure and commerce, of love, war, peace and the making of a nation. Sweeping from Penobscot to Santa Fe, from the Wisconsin woods to Shiloh, Big River, Big Man is a novel with its roots in historical destiny. To read it is to capture the spirit and substance of an age -- Book jacket.

William M. "Bill" Tilghman had one of the most illustrious careers of any Old West lawman, serving as sheriff, town marshal, and deputy United States marshal in some of the toughest places west of the Mississippi. But he faced perhaps his greatest and most dangerous challenge when he rode alone into the wild Oklahoma Territory settlement of Burnt Creek on the trail of a gang of rustlers and outlaws with some unexpected allies . . .