Celebrated folklorist and author Jim Hoy has spent most of his life living in the heart of the famed Flint Hills of Kansas and documenting and celebrating his fellow Kansans and plains folk. Like rounding up stray cattle in a rolling pasture, Hoy has gathered over a hundred stray stories, tales without a single theme or unified narrative, and corraled them up here for the very first time. Branding these stories in sections like Cattle Towns, Outlaws, and Cowboy Music, Hoy’s vignettes teach, excite, charm, and instill a deep pride in anyone fortunate enough to have lived on the Great Plains. In Gathering Strays, Hoy gives us a collection of stories about Kansas, the Great Plains, and Western life that reflect his life-long love of the land, experience, and history of the region. Hoy introduces us to folks like Elmer McCurdy, a failed train robber whose arsenic-embalmed body went on tour and made money for the undertaker, and Ame Cole, who scolded Russian Grand Duke Alexis on his table manners. Writing as an easygoing storyteller, Hoy covers familiar areas like rodeos and cattle drives, takes us from Dodge City to Beer City and everywhere in between, explains why Kansas has the best state song in the nation, and expands our picture of cowboys with stories of Australian drovers, Black cowboys, and Mexican vaqueros. Throughout, his easy-to-read yet authoritative style describes the people, places, and events that make the region so distinctive and celebrated. Gathering Strays will be hailed by anyone interested in the heroes and villains, towns and ranges, and myths and legends of the West.

"The Log of a Cowboy" is an account of a five-month drive of 3,000 cattle from Brownsville, Texas, to Montana during 1882 along the Great Western Cattle Trail. The book is considered by many to be literature's best account of cowboy life. "Reed Anthony, Cowman: An Autobiography" is the fascinating story of the protagonist and how he became a successful rancher. "The Wells Brothers: The Young Cattle Kings" tells the story of two brothers who are broke and want to sell their father's ranch until one day everything changes. "A Texas Matchmaker" a man makes it big in Texas. "The Outlet" another cowboy story with a detailed account of how to herd cattle in a true cowboy fashion. Andy Adams (1859–1935) was an American writer of western fiction and was born in Indiana. Since childhood Andy used to help his parents with the cattle and horses on the family farm. Due to this Andy's works have been lauded widely for his first hand and authentic portrayal of the life of a cowboy unlike his contemporaries like Owen Wister who romanticised it.

Dreaming of Grass Valley, a truer than life novel of the lives, loves, adventures, and hijinks of a couple of seasoned cowboys, a wolf dog, and a mail-order bride all trying to make their future in a California gold camp. When Big Jim von Reinhoff and his lifelong friend, Maximum Epps, decide to follow their dream of building a ranch in the pine-studded hills of Grass Valley, they are thrown together by chance with a mail-order bride from St. Louis and an escaped Apache pet wolf dog named Dee-Oh-Gee. Through Indian attacks, broken hearts, hardships, dangers, and unforeseen adventures, they develop a special relationship that keeps them together and, despite it all, they never lose sight of the dream. This riveting tale and revealing story will stir the hard core, historical, western buff, while capturing the allure and fascination of the romance reader.

At the foot of the Wind River Mountains and just east of the continental divide was Tenbow Valley, eighty miles of rich, watered graze on the way to Oregon territory. From Cheyenne, Jack Stillman has come to Tenbow to solve a string of murders. Each victim was a landowner in the valley, and each killing was carried out with a deadly, long range rifle. Taking on the guise of a gambler, Stillman is quick to line up his suspects and start prying open their secrets. But while greed is the likeliest reason for the murders, the killer keeps striking—even when Stillman has his eye on the suspects. Suddenly, in a land of wild honeysuckle, snowy mountain peaks, and the spirits of native warriors, the veteran lawman realizes he's made a fatal mistake and missed a motive as old as time itself...Now it may be too late because an expert at murder has Stillman in the crosshairs of his gun...

This Yarn is about a young cowboy drifting West in the mid 1870s. Finding himself looking at winter in the Bitterroot Valley he hired on at a ranch run by an old man and his son. While riding the high country searching for strays he stumbles onto a trail that looks like rustlers at work. The trail leads to Dillon and some mining towns in the mountains and eventually back at the ranch after some unexpected and dangerous detours. About the Author: I worked in the trades for over 40 years and wore out parts of my body that kept me from a daily work schedule. We got our first computer to assist me with some "Online" schooling. Being very ignorant about computers and my typing was rusty, having been fifty years out of high school, I started writing. Since I was a beginner I fumbled around with Microsoft "Works" and a dictionary. I read my work and edited and reread it time and again. A friend told me that after one hundred thousand words things would begin to fall in place. We upgraded computer programs, ditched the dictionary and after over ten years (mostly shelf life) I found an interested soul and wouldn't you know it, electronic "books". I hope you enjoy it..

The Tennessee Tucker Saga by John W. Lawson

Is our civil service fit for purpose? Michael Coolican takes John Reid's damning statement about the Home Office as his point of departure for a comprehensive overview and evaluation of the machinery behind the government and the people who make public services work on a daily basis. Beginning with Henry VIII's chief minister Thomas Cromwell, Michael Coolican takes us on an odyssey through the history of the British civil service, starting with a time when public positions were sold and traded through Royal Warrant. Coolican examines the radical reforms of the Victorian era which entrenched a culture of elitism, misogyny and distrust of high-quality data as a basis for decision making, that, in some areas, persists to this day. A former high-level civil servant with forty years of experience, Coolican has produced a pithy and, where necessary, ruthless analysis of the civil service and its relationship with government, especially at Cabinet level, bringing to bear detailed and extensive research informed by a true insider.

High in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, Alma Hawkins anxiously awaits the return of her son Virgil, who against her wishes and despite all her reasons went down into the lowlands to volunteer for the Confederacy. This trouble over slavery wasn’t their fight she’d argued. She and his young wife needed him here. But he wouldn’t hear it. It was a matter of honor he’d told her. And besides, his service would only last a few months. He’d be back before they knew it. Just as his term is nearing its expected completion however, he is told that he is no longer a volunteer and that he can’t go home. The government has passed a conscription act and all men between the ages of 18 and 35 are now required to serve indefinitely. Meanwhile, in the time that he’s been away, the shadows of war, once confined to the battlefields, have begun to spread into the mountains, and the war’s deteriorating conditions have provoked growing violence among deserters, evaders, and the authorities. Seeking to profit from all this confusion, rogue outlaws have also begun to roam the hills, and when unexpected events occur in the highlands near their home both Alma and Virgil are forced to make decisions for the preservation of their family in the face of danger. Along with the central character, Alma Hawkins, the novel involves the interactions of mountain neighbors, townsfolk, soldiers, outlaws and the rest of the Hawkins clan.The story, although plot driven and well paced, is also philosophic in tone and examines both the strengths and insecurities of an aging woman struggling with decisions in the face of an uncertain fate.