Western For Kids

“Oh, I want to go back to the Rio Grande! The Rio! That’s where I long to be!” The words, sung in a soft and musical tenor, died away and changed to a plaintive whistle, leaving the scene more lonely than ever. For a few moments nothing was to be seen except the endless expanse of wilderness, and nothing was to be heard save the mournful warble of the singer. Then a horse and rider were suddenly framed where the sparse timber opened out upon the plain. Together, man and mount made a striking picture; yet it would have been hard to say which was the more picturesque—the rider or the horse.

Out of nowhere Comanches attack, and sixteen year-old Jane narrowly survives the slaughter of her family and the kidnapping of her baby sister. Driven by grief and fury, she rides headlong into Indian territory, seeking vengeance. But the odds are stacked against a young girl on the trail, and Jane soon realizes she must disguise herself as a boy to join forces with a tough company of cowhands on a cattle drive to Dodge City.

The Keystone Kid had come all the way from Pennsylvania to be a cowboy, and stepped off the train dressed to the teeth in an atrocious freshly bought Western outfit. It was no surprise to anyone when he almost instantly became the butt of some unpleasant jokes in the local bar. What was surprising was that he made no attempt to fight back against the bully who had decided to make a show of it. He gained two things that day - his name, the "Keystone Kid," and his reputation as a coward.

The year is 1910. Nate Cooper is an old-school cowboy. He sees the change brought by the turn of the century and reckons none of it to be good. Even after spending nearly 30 years in a Montana prison for a wrongful murder conviction, Nate’s moral compass is true and unwavering: He does all the wrong things for all the right reasons. So when he returns to his northern Montana ranching town to find the Blackfoot Indians - the people he went to prison trying to defend - are still being cheated out of their territory by ranchers, Nate can’t rest on his laurels.

The Bodacious Kid is a novel alive with humor, suspense, romance, and authentic frontier atmosphere gained through a lifetime of living, researching, and depicting the West.

He was 14. The Comanche slaughtered his parents and burned his house to the ground. His only brother never returned from the Civil War. Now the kid from Hondo, Texas, had nothing or no one. What would he do? Where would he go? How would he live? A chance good Samaritan act in the middle of the desert changed the course of his life and gave him a way to survive in the most dangerous way possible.