Showing results by author "Richard S. Wheeler" in All Categories

It’s 1877, and all over the West, frontier towns have sprung up, drawing those in search of new beginnings after the Civil War. The young community of Payday is a paradise of rolling meadows and balmy skies, with a quiet population of ranchers and merchants. Into this Eden comes young editor Sam Flint, whose fledgling newspaper, the Payday Pioneer, earns him friends within the town and trumpets Payday’s glories throughout the West.

These are the stories of Uranus. Stories of new beginnings and creation. Stories of the mysterious seventh planet in our solar system and of the God of the sky that it was named after.

Collected here are 10 Western short stories by Richard S. Wheeler, the award-winning author who makes storytelling look easy. In "Mugs Birdsong's Crime Academy", celebrated criminal Mugs Birdsong decides to found an academy that will instruct lawmen on the ways and means of lawlessness. "The Last Days of Dominic Prince" is the tragic tale of a cattle baron and his final conflict with the forces of political correctness. "Dead Weight" introduces us to a coffin maker who constructs a work of art.

From the very beginning, Sam Stop was an enigma to the people living in Pony, Montana. Stop didn't look like a banker, dress like a banker, or act like a banker. So, while there were some initial suspicions about Stop's background, people came to respect and then trust the reclusive founder of Pony's local bank. Soon the bank became the main depository for the assets of the Pony Consolidated Mining Company. Then one day, everything begins to change.

During the 1886 Montana drought, Harvard-educated John Quincy Putnam had Federal Law on his side, and desperate, angry neighbors surrounding him. A hard 1887 winter follows, and ranchers pay the price for overgrazing. Texas fever, foreign investors, and strong-arm cattlemen's associations all mount up against "Quin" Putnam when, under the law, he runs strings of barbed wire along two sides of his range.

From the moment Abner Dent spotted Eve in a Maiden dance hall, he knew he wanted her for his wife. He promised her everything and kept his word. He built her the finest white house in Judith basin and ordered the finest furnishings.

After being reformed for five years in the Wyoming pen, the celebrated criminal Mugs Birdsong decides to found a crime academy that will instruct lawmen on the ways of means of lawlessness. He sets up shop in an abandoned orphanage in Rock Springs, and soon is instructing classes in bank robbery, train robbery, and various other sterling occupations. He sells autographed wanted posters, and persuades a banker to let him stage a mock robbery at the bank, for the benefit of his students - and that's when the fun begins.

Wiley Smart is as sly and cunning as his fake name. Hannah Holt is like an unexpected tonic on a hot, dusty prairie. Linc Larrimer is 12, orphaned, and has a chip on his shoulder the size of a two-by-four. These three unlikely bunkmates are thrown together in a hilarious journey through Indian territory, under the vigilant eye of the most feared Indian of all - Red Cloud.

He was a peace-loving man forced to fight for his kin and his rights against the U. S. Army. In the 40 years since Richard Lamb had come to Montana, he had built a thriving trading post where he lived with his Blackfoot Indian wife, their children, and grandchildren. It was a hard, but happy existence. That is until "they" came....

Life hasn't always been easy for March and Kermit McPhee, but things are looking up. March gives birth to a healthy son, and their small gold mine is looking better and better as Kermit blasts his way along a good seam of ore. Then Kermit is crushed by a cave-in. As soon as her husband dies, crooks are at March's door, eager to get their hands on the mine. The peaceful town of Marysville, Montana, is peaceful no more.

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.

One day, Gladstone Brass spotted buzzards circling, and curiosity led him to investigate. He found a dead burro and an injured Bitter Bowler, his enemy, with his revolver trained on Brass. Bowler claimed he had broken his leg and couldn't move. He wanted Brass' water. When Brass refused, Bowler shot Brass' burro, Tia Maria, then told him the next shot would be for him if he didn't leave his water and supplies and get more water and something he could use for a crutch.

Winner of the Owen Wister Lifetime Achievement Award, Richard S. Wheeler garnered his sixth Spur Award for Snowbound, a powerful biographical novel. When enigmatic 19th-century explorer John Frémont finds himself trapped in the Colorado mountains, he must struggle against man, nature, and himself to overcome the harrowing dangers in his path.

The cowboys, gold miners, outlaws, gunmen, prostitutes, and marshals who populate the Wild West never see much big-city entertainment. Those Western towns are too wild and rowdy for entertainers to enter, let alone perform in. All that is about change.

Down the eastern slopes of the Rockies, out upon the Great Plains, and into the heart of Blackfeet country flows the Two Medicine River. To this wild and beautiful land, come a pair of young wanderers, half-breeds born of two worlds, but belonging to neither. Marie Therese de Paris - driven by the fires in her spirit - sets out on a vision quest, hoping to save the Blackfeet from their cruel fate. Peter Kipp, bold and ambitious, chooses to follow his father. Bound by love, but torn by their loyalties, they share a single destiny.

Candace enters the Badlands on a scientific expedition. Young, beautiful, and in love with knowledge, she is there to study early man and prehistoric fossils. But what begins with the purest of motives will end in a nightmare of violence and lust. For the men accompanying her are there to plunder the Sioux Nation, to steal their treasures, deface their sacred places, and rob them of their holiest relics. Now hell itself is loose in the Badlands, and the revenge of the Sioux will know no bounds.

Meagher County, Montana, is Hereford country. All the ranchers are raising Angus or Hereford cattle - all except Sam Hook. He is the only holdout, continuing to herd longhorns as he has for years. Since everyone uses public range, there is no way to keep Hook's longhorn bulls from breeding with the Hereford herds, lowering their value.

An editor is popular only if he can keep a secret, and Sam Flint’s new home of Oro Blanco has more than its share. Flint chooses this small frontier town, the site of the richest gold strike in the New Mexico Territory, to launch his newest weekly newspaper, the Oro Blanco Nugget. As soon as he hits town, however, Flint can tell that something is not right, as the atmosphere in Oro Blanco is thick with signs of corruption and injustice.

Sam Flint is a dedicated frontier journalist whose only weapon is the truth. But when he pulls into Silver City to set up his crusading weekly newspaper, he fears he's made a mistake. The over-populated town is being run into the ground by the corrupt editor of the Silver City Democrat, Digby Westminster. A friend of merchants and flatterer of politicians, the manipulative scoundrel has grown fat ridiculing the miners and working girls while making sure they are ruthlessly taxed into destitution.

Buffalo Bill Cody, Bat Masterson, and other legendary heroic figures of America's Old West get the royal treatment in White Hats, a collection of stories by esteemed Western authors. This anthology is expertly compiled by Robert J. Randisi, who has gathered extraordinary stories of those who wear the white hat from well-known authors like John Jakes, Richard S. Wheeler, James Reasoner, and others.