Brazos River Marauders

Colt Horn was born on a pioneer trail to Scottish parents seeking new land they could call their own. But at the age of fifteen, he finds his parents murdered and is set adrift on the dangerous mission of vengeance. He grows to manhood surviving battles, hardships, and struggles, eventually becoming the owner of a large ranch. When he meets Liz Hanes, he wants to marry her and settle down. But none of his dreams can be realized until his parents' murderers are brought to justice. Colt learns that the man who killed his parents and is now leader of the Brazos River Marauders, wants him dead or alive and has posted a large bounty on his head. The attacks on neighboring ranches and on his life provoke him to leave his ranch and work full-time in an effort to eliminate the lawlessness in his valley. He will, at last, bring the leader of the Brazos River Marauders to justice-or die trying. Plenty of action brings the Old West to life in this tale filled with cowboys, love, revenge, and ultimately, redemption.

For the last several years, times have been tough for Scotland natives James and Charlotte Mathieson Hector and their four children. They live in fear of being remanded to the Indebtedness Court and placed in bondage as indentured slaves. They crave freedom and have learned it exists in America. Determined their descendants will have a better life in Americabetter than the life they would face in ScotlandJames takes the long voyage to the New World, arriving in the New York harbor on March 31, 1820. The rest of the family joins him several months later, and they soon settle in Virginia. Told in two parts, Unmarked Trail first narrates the heart-wrenching story one familys struggles to stay alive and their subsequent immigration to America, where they build a family in Virginia. It then follows the life of a poor farm boy whose odyssey begins in the cotton fields of Oklahoma. His poverty-stricken pioneer family survives the Great Depression by hard work, sheer luck, and ingenuity. His path leads him through more than twenty foreign countries, World War II, and the Korean conflict. A work of historical fiction, this novel tells two stories of families overcoming hardships to forge a new life.

As outlaw Jake Leach lies dying in a deserted cave, he writes a desperate letter to his brother, Tom, a US Marshal. Jake has double-crossed his boss, the violent and vindictive Quirt Evans, stealing eighty thousand dollars worth of government-owned gold coins from his own outlaw gang in hopes of redemption. By the time Tom Leach receives Jakes letter, Jake is dead; however, the outlaw left clues that will lead Tom to the stashed gold coins. Jakes final request is for Tom to return the coins to their rightful owner. Maybe then his soul can rest in peace. Tom has his hands full, though, keeping the peace as greedy marauders threaten new settlers in untamed land. In order to discover Jakes lost gold, Tom must fight his way through outlaws on the wild frontier. As Jakes clues become more convoluted and Quirts gang moves closer, Tom is forced to forget his lawman ways and act the outlaw himself. Otherwise, hell end up dead like Jake, and his brothers last indiscretion will linger in eternity.

Running more than 1,200 miles from headwaters in eastern New Mexico through the middle of Texas to the Gulf of Mexico, the Brazos River has frustrated developers for nearly two centuries. This environmental history of the Brazos traces the techniques that engineers and politicians have repeatedly used to try to manage its flow. The vast majority of projects proposed or constructed in this watershed were failures, undone by the geology of the river as much as the cost of improvement. When developers erected locks, the river changed course. When they built large-scale dams, floodwaters overflowed the concrete rims. When they constructed levees, the soils collapsed. Yet lawmakers and laypeople, boosters and engineers continued to work toward improving the river and harnessing it for various uses. Through the plight of the Brazos River Archer illuminates the broader commentary on the efforts to tame this nation’s rivers as well as its historical perspectives on development and technology. The struggle to overcome nature, Archer notes, reflects a quintessentially American faith in technology.

Known for his tenacity in pursuing lawbreakers, U.S. Marshal Frank Marlin follows a dangerous mission to quell a brewing range war on the western frontier. Hes told that Cottonwood Valley, a rich fertile land in the State of Texas, is the target of the trouble. The valleys large-ranch owners blame each other for the cattle rustling, ambush killings, and other acts of lawlessness. They threaten to wipe each other out; fury on the range seems unavoidable. During his mission, Marlin learns that a wily outlaw boss, who strikes ranches and towns from his hideouts in the badlands, perpetrates the trouble in Cottonwood Valley. When the outlaw boss hears Marlin is on his way, he offers his henchmen a large cash bounty to anyone who kills the feared marshal. Marlin must always be on the lookout for those who want him dead. Encountering life-threatening situations and suffering serious wounds, Marlin never loses sight of his intense desire to stop the killing and cattle rustling.

As soon as he bumps into Susan Parker in a college hallway, Lance Taylor realizes the moment is an auspicious turning point in his life. While he searches for something impressive to say, Susan smiles, gives him her phone number, and agrees to a date the following day. Unfortunately neither Susan nor Lance have any idea what is about to transpire for both of them. It is love at first sight and not long before Lance and Susan become engaged. But everything changes the night Susan is involved in a car accident caused by a driver on a criminal mission that leaves her parents dead, Susan in the hospital, and an unidentified two-year-old unscathed in the backseat of the other car. As a complex mystery unfolds, Lance learns Susans father owned a large uncut diamond desperately wanted by a mastermind criminal. While Lance and Susan launch an investigation to determine the toddlers identity, her parents lawyer is kidnapped and his life threatened unless certain demands are met. As the terror increases, a small clue is left behind that may finally help solve the mystery and identify a killer once and for all. In this action-packed thriller, an unplanned meeting propels two college students into the midst of pivotal consequences caused by a crazed murderer determined to stop at nothing to obtain what he wants.

This is a history of the Comancheros, or Mexicans who traded with the Comanche Indians in the early Southwest. When Don Juan Bautista de Anza and Ecueracapa, a Comanche leader, concluded a peace treaty in 1786, mutual trade benefits resulted, and the treaty was never afterward broken by either side. New Mexican Comancheros were free to roam the plains to trade goods, and when Americans introduced, the Comanches and New Mexicans even joined in a loose, informal alliance that made the American occupation of the plains very costly. Similarly, in the 1860s the Comancheros would trade guns and ammunition to the Comanches and Kiowas, allowing them to wreck a gruesome toll on the advancing Texans.

The book leads the reader through the past to the present and here leaves him amid active and progressive men who are advancing, along with him, toward the future. Including, as it does, lives of men now living, it constitutes a connecting link between what has gone before and what is to come after. It is therefore fitting that it should be dedicated to a prominent man of our day in preference to one of former times. The matter presented, in the nature of things, is largely biographical. There can be no foundation for history without biography. History is a generalization of particulars. It presents wide extended views. To use a paradox, history gives us but a part of history. That other part which it does not give us, the part which introduces us to the thoughts, aspirations and daily life of a people, is supplied by biography. The men whose deeds are recorded in this book were or are deeply identified with Texas, and the preservation in this volume in enduring form of some remembrance of them—their names, who and what they were—has been a pleasant task to one who feels a deep interest and pride in Texas—its past history, its heroes and future destiny.