Michael Zimmer

Wil Chama was interviewed in 1938 as a contributor to the American Legends Collection, a part of the Federal Writers' Project. Speaking into an Edison Dictaphone he narrated the events of his life. His personal narrative included his involvement as a strike breaker in what became known as the Gunnison Affair. It was as a result of this shameful episode that he gained his reputation as a gunman and sought to bury himself as a driver of a salt wagon...

On the Bar Five Ranch, Jacob Wilder runs a few head of cattle to pay the bills and keep the family stocked in what can't be raised, hunted, or traded for. Some of the newer citizens in this part of Montana Territory claim the only thing Jacob Wilder can raise with any success is hell and sons - he has four of them, and like father, like sons

An intriguing tale of métis buffalo hunts, a long-lost daughter, and a macabre secret. Big John McTavish has been hunting and trading among the métis buffalo hunters of the Red River Valley for more than thirty years. He's a trusted member of the half-breed nation, and a leader of the mixed-bloods' twice-yearly buffalo hunts. However, when he returns to the settlements in the fall of 1832 with a mountain man he's rescued from a Chippewa war party,...

"Synopsis : In 1885, young Rose Edwards is widowed by Montana vigilantes who hang her husband for an alleged theft, then burn her Yellowstone Valley cabin to the ground as a warning for her and others of her kind to quit the territory. Penniless and illiterate, yet fiercely independent, Rose begins a two-year odyssey to revisit the land of her childhood, a land she once traveled with her father, an itinerant robe trader among the Assiniboines and...

"Tom Slade is riding shotgun for the Colorado and Prescott Stagecoach Company, in charge of delivering $45,000 in cash to the mines in central Arizona, when the stage is robbed at an isolated way station. Most men would have gone on to Prescott for help, but Slade knows he doesn't have that kind of time if he hopes to catch up with the thieves before they disappear into the desert. Alone and riding a worn-out harness mule, Slade grimly sets off in...

"Half-frozen and nearly dead, Gil Ryan rode into the little mountain town of Larkspur just ahead of a raging late-winter blizzard. He'd lost everything he owned except for his mount and the clothes on his back when his pack horse fell through the ice on the Big Sandy River; racked with fever, early-stage pneumonia, and a barely healed gunshot wound, all he wanted was a little medicine and a warm place to wait out the storm. But Gil had no way of knowing...

"Nineteen-year-old Gage Pardell didn't intend to kill Henry Kalb when he rode into Shelburn, Texas, to confront the son of the county's richest man. He just wanted justice for what Kalb had done to his sister. But now Henry is dead, and Gage is on the run from a gang of vicious bounty hunters hired by Henry's father. With nowhere else to go, Gage heads west toward the far-flung buffalo ranges of West Texas. There, he learns what it means to stand...

When Jesse Ross was eighteen, he was forced to learn firsthand that a person's life could be changed irrevocably by one deed, and that one act can set an endless chain of events into motion. That was something Jesse's neighbor, Gray Fletcher, had experienced years before when he was with the Texas Rangers. Gray had joined to seek retaliation against marauding Indians who killed two of his children and took his wife captive. Now Jessie has killed a...

"The Trading Post and Other Frontier Stories, edited by Hazel Rumney, features fourteen brand-new stories that will delight historical fiction fans. These stories capture the spirit of freedom and individualism in the evolving American frontier through the early 1900s and feature exciting new characters who face life-changing challenges in settings that are in stark contrast to civilized society. Ranging from high-action traditional Westerns to introspective...