Dramatized Westerns

Agon Bordner is dead, and the ranch he cheated for has been handed over to Deed Corrigan and his brothers. But before they can get the Bar 3 back on its feet, Deed, Holt, and Blue must fight to rebuild the town by buying the bank and appointing a marshal. For a moment, peace looks possible for these three weary veterans of the trail — until the guns begin to fire.

The Indians around Fort Laramie, Wyoming are peaceful. Or so it has seemed - until killers ambush a detail of U.S. soldiers and an officer's wife. One man, an ambitious cavalry officer, flees the carnage and lives to tell the story - his own story, an outright lie. When Duff MacCallister and a few brave men go after the attackers, they discover the officer's wife is very much alive and at the cold merciless hands of the sadistic warrior Yellow Hawk.

Bill Ash, an escaped convict returns to find his father murdered.

Joe Miles must save a family from the killing torrents of a flash flood - while under fire from thieves after a railroad payroll. Once fired for being old, he's still young enough to be a hero.

Brad Kelly planned for weeks, set everything carefully in place - then he hit the Pioneer State Bank for $53,000. Will he kill to keep it?

Zane Grey shows his knowledge of Indian tribes and their history and the peon system of Mexican plantations.

About the fascinating Mrs. King, young Rosalia Dures, and the strong, silent Tom Folliard. A story in which bullets supply the answer after all other ways fail.

Jane Candia Coleman is a natural storyteller whose characters come from the lands between the southwestern valleys of Arizona and the Gila Mountains of New Mexico. The night Billy the Kid died is hauntingly depicted in "Corrido for Billy". "Lady Flo" is a memoir, based on historical fact, of the black wife of an Irish nobleman. "Moving On" depicts a young girl abandoned by her family who finds her way with an itinerant Jewish peddler. And "Are You Coming Back, Phin Montana?" is the winner of the 1995 Spur Award for Best Western Short Fiction.

Two young men in the gold fields of California spend a last evening together as one of them, very sick, confronts his own imminent death. The tenderness between them may seem idealized, but you understand by listening to this story how premature death from accident and disease haunted the lives of far more westerners than death by violence.

Haseloff's characters embody the fundamental values - honor, duty, courage, and family - that prevailed on the American frontier and were instilled in the young Haseloff by her own "heroes", her mother and her grandmother. Her stories, in a sense, dramatize how these values endure when challenged by the adversities and cruelties of frontier existence.

Brother Shotgun is about an old buffalo hunter whose return to the plains after the Civil War keeps being delayed by the needs of a young woman who has taken in a number of orphans.

Julia's daddy was the judge in town. He used to be fair, but recently it seemed that had changed. What cost to regular folks would there be?

Caleb Doorn is better known by his Blackfoot name, Many Coups. Doorn is scouting for the US Army in the Mexican campaign when a small wagon train passes on its way to California. Their trek will take them into Indian country, and to protect the train from attack, the wagon master has foolishly taken a young Blackfoot woman hostage.

Mountain man Smoke Jensen lives by the rules of the frontier. The first rule is: the strongest survive. But when bad breaks, bad weather and bad bovines back Smoke into a corner, he needs something to go right. Instead, he faces the kind of tough luck only a gun can beat....A contract to deliver 3000 head of cattle might just do the trick. But a renegade Cheyenne warrior uses an early winter blizzard to attack Smoke and his out-gunned cowboys.

The gold-mining town of Red Light, Montana is the kind of backwater hole less famous for the folks that live there than the ones who die there - like Janey Jensen, Smoke Jensen's sister. Smoke never would have gone there if it hadn't been for her estate. But that isn't the only thing the Mountain Man's got to settle. There's also the score between him and Major Cosgrove. The man who owns Red Light - lock, stock and barrel - is six feet of trouble looking for somebody like Smoke to bring out the worst in him.

US Deputy Marshall Edward Spencer is re-assigned Colorado to the after the death of his wife. Sheriff Jacob Gannon manages grief over his son's suicide while keeping the peace in the town of Leadville. When an entire herd of cattle destroyed and a young settler girl dies, the two lawmen must join forces despite their differences to look into both...and how the two crimes just might be related.

When Harry French left home he was just another kid looking to make his way. But when he comes back four years later, things are different. He's different. Or at least the town thinks so. Now nobody looks him in the eye. He isn't just Harry anymore, he's the Shifter, a gunfighter who brings trouble with him wherever he goes. And as hard as Harry tries, he finds that a reputation is a lot harder to put down than a gun.

A cruel, hated man collects a fortune, then disappears in the desert. The Texas Rangers think it's murder and put one of their best on the job - but he'll need help. There's evil here that no one suspects.

Original story published in Lariat story magazine - July 1947.

Matt Hurst seeks justice when a sheriff's posse kills his father and brothers.