DIVOnly for Yellowstone Kelly can a lazy day at the bar turn into a race against time to recover a priceless skeleton/divDIV Charles Darwin’s survey aboard the HMS Beagle forever changed natural history, causing a flurry of wild speculation and exploration in the wake of every major find. Yellowstone Kelly, fresh off his misadventures in Kelly Blue, is cooling his heels in a Wyoming saloon when he encounters a specimen hunter. Pignuts, the saloon owner, had bartered whiskey for a strange, three-toed horse skeleton and now displays the fossil proudly in his bar. A cold-eyed stranger comes in, buys the bones for a handful of gold, and introduces himself as paleontologist Jonathan Cope./divDIV /divDIVCope recruits Kelly to be his guide through the Wyoming wilds. The professor and his beautiful assistant, Alys, hope to find what the Sioux call Thunder Horses—enormous fossilized bones weathered out of the hills. This trip, like many other Kelly expeditions, won’t be an easy one. Trailing the trio on their journey is Blue Fox, a Dartmouth-educated Cheyenne madman who notoriously loathes professors of all stripes. Along the way, Kelly crosses paths with some of the most illustrious figures of the era as he helps his group navigate the many predicaments of the Old West./div

Four fast-paced novels based on the real-life frontier adventures of Yellowstone Kelly, one of the Old West’s most legendary soldiers. Luther “Yellowstone” Kelly had one of the longest, strangest, and most breathtaking careers in the American West. The intrepid scout’s talent for being in the right place at an exciting time would take him all over the world, from the Great Plains to Africa to the Philippines to Cuba. Throughout his adventures, Kelly maintained a stoic outlook, a fierce wit, and a talent for survival that got him out of more than a few dangerous scrapes. From hunting wolves with the Nez Percé to encounters with Jim Bridger and Brigham Young to a stint with the Rough Riders, in these four novels Yellowstone carves an exciting, hilarious, and unforgettable path through the Old West—maintaining his trademark humor and fortitude, always finding his way through even the stickiest mess.

This wide-ranging collection of essays addresses a diverse and expanded vision of Montana literature, offering new readings of both canonical and overlooked texts. Although a handful of Montana writers such as Richard Hugo, A. B. Guthrie Jr., D'Arcy McNickle, and James Welch have received considerable critical attention, sizable gaps remain in the analysis of the state's ever-growing and ever-evolving canon. The twelve essays in "All Our Stories Are Here" not only build on the exemplary, foundational work of other writers but also open further interpretative and critical conversations. Expanding on the critical paradigms of the past and bringing to bear some of the latest developments in literary and cultural studies, the contributors engage issues such as queer ambivalence in Montana writing, representations of the state in popular romances, and the importance of the University of Montana's creative writing program in fostering the state's literary corpus. The contributors also explore the work of writers who have not yet received their critical due, take new looks at old friends, and offer some of the first explorations of recent works by well-established artists. "All Our Stories Are Here" conveys a sense of continuity in the field of Western literary criticism, while at the same time challenging conventional approaches to regional literature.

Gabriel Du Pré's Aunt Pauline has a list of husbands and ex-husbands and future husbands even she herself has trouble remembering. So Du Pré isn't exactly surprised when she shows up in Toussaint complaining that her current man, a lovable roughneck named Badger, has run off. His longer-than-usual absence has Pauline worried, and Du Pré promises to look into exactly what sort of trouble he has gotten himself into. No one quite imagines, least of all Pauline, that the first thing Du Pré will find in his investigation is Badger's body, lying in a remote part of the Montana wilderness with a bullet-hole in the base of his skull. Du Pré has a hunch his old friend and foil Harvey Wallace will be interested in the case-after all, Gabriel Du Pré's Montana is teeming with just the sorts of people that tend to interest Wallace's employers, the FBI, and the odds that Badger got mixed up with them seem inordinately high. The trail leads straight into the teeming underworld of illegal, remote brush races involving a ragtag bunch of traveling horsemen, with many thousands of dollars wagered upon each race. Forced to go undercover to determine how Badger met his end, Du Pré finds his own horse and jockey to bet on in another complicated, fascinating outing for Montana's favorite Métis son. Peter Bowen's tough, rough-edged, likable hero rides again in Stewball, an intricate installment in a classic series by one of the genre's quirkiest and most beloved practitioners.

Two highly acclaimed mysteries are now available in one volume, featuring Montana cattle-brand inspector and occasional sleuth Gabriel Du Pr.

A tracker helps a paleontological research team cross the plains of Wyoming in search of a "three-toed horse," in a novel based on the real-life exploits of Luther "Yellowstone" Kelly, a nineteenth-century hunter, rancher, and scout in the American West.

It's dry season in Montana, and fires blazing west of Touissant have spread to the Wolf Mountains. Métis-Indian fiddler, tracker, and reluctant sleuth Gabriel Du Pré suspects the fires have been intentionally set and are linked to the recent murder of Old Maddy Collins, an eccentric woman found in her living room, her head beaten in with a cast-iron hatchet. Du Pré's suspicions are heightened when two teenagers snooping around Maddy's house turn up dead in the mountains, buried beneath ash and riddled with bullet wounds. With its sly wit and comic touches, combined with colorful characters and lyrical prose evocative of Montana, Peter Bowen's Ash Child makes for an exceptionally rich and deeply satisfying novel.

A guide to series fiction lists popular series, identifies novels by character, and offers guidance on the order in which to read unnumbered series.

When Gabriel Du Pr's precocious granddaughter Pallas returns from her studies in Washington, D.C., the entire clan in Toussaint, Montana, is happy to see her. Except Du Pr, that is, because the crotchety old fiddlin' cowboy knows that where Pallas goes, trouble is likely to follow. A van full of praying, protesting fundamentalist Christians has arrived in Toussaint at just about the same time. A young soldier follows, just back from Iraq, missing a leg, an eye, and his grip on reality. Du Pr suspects that he's going to have his hands full for the foreseeable future. Graffiti appears on the door of clumsy Father Van Den Heuvel's church, and a cryptic phone call from a missing girl causes concern in town. When a confluence of these strange events and even stranger people threatens problems that even laid-back Du Pr can't ignore, another quirky, compelling, and purely enjoyable mystery unfolds in Peter Bowen's Montana, a land trouble tends to visit often, with unpredictable but fiercely entertaining results.

Gabriel Du Pré, the old Métis fiddler at the center of Peter Bowen's atmospheric, engrossing series set in the dirty, dusty Montana that's rarely featured in travel brochures, has a knack for finding trouble. Or rather, trouble has a knack for finding him. There's a rumor going around that Du Pré and his old sorceror friend Benetsee have come across a parcel containing the lost journals of Lewis and Clark, and outsiders, drawn by the spirit of the legendary explorers, are beginning to invade Toussaint. Du Pré won't say whether he's got the journals or not, preferring his usual routine of cigarettes, a whiskey ditch or two and a few fiddling gigs up and down Montana's highways to getting involved in this controversy. Benetsee isn't talking, either, but when a journalist goes a little too far in trying to get the story of the lost journals, and the two men's friends and family are put squarely in the face of danger, Du Pré doesn't have much choice but to wade in and set things right. The Gabriel Du Pré mysteries have become required reading for fans of the vanishing West, and Peter Bowen's storytelling talent continues to thrive in The Tumbler, a dazzling entry in what has become a classic series.