Showing results by author "Louis L'Amour" in All Categories

In Louis L'Amour's frontier stories, the American West is the crucible in which character is tested, reputations are won or lost, and life always hangs in the balance. Struggling to survive against the elements, hostile Indians, or outlaws who prey upon the honest and hardworking, the men and women in these tales each come face-to-face with what they're made of - often in moments that explode with the violence of an avalanche or the speed of a drawn gun.

In a remote corner of Utah lies the secret outlaw kingdom of Ben Curry. For 15 years Curry has ruled supreme, as his men have pulled jobs from Canada to Mexico. But the king is getting old...he wants to turn his legacy over to someone younger, tougher. Mike Bastian is Ben's adopted son, a young man who can handle a knife, a gun, his fists, but a man who's never broken the law. Now, as treachery explodes among Ben's riders, and two honest lawmen - Tyrel Sackett and Borden Chantry - begin to zero in on the gang, Mike must choose....

This third volume of Louis L'Amour's collected stories is a thrilling tribute to the unique spirit of our frontier heritage and proves again the enduring popularity of America's favorite storyteller.

They came by river and by wagon train, braving the endless distances of the Great Plains and the icy passes of the Sierra Nevada. They were men like Linus Rawlings, a restless survivor of Indian country who’d headed east to see the ocean but left his heart - and his home - in the West. They were women like Lilith Prescott, a smart, spirited beauty who fled her family and fell for a gambling man in the midst of a frontier gold boom. These pioneering men and women sowed the seeds of a nation with their courage....

When Duncan McKaskel decided to move his family west, he knew he would face dangers, and he was prepared for them. He knew about the exhausting terrain, and he was expecting the punishing elements. What he worried about was having to use violence against other men - men who would follow him and try to steal the riches that he didn't even possess.

It was the only water for miles in a vast, sun-blasted desert where water meant survival. So Logan Cates naturally headed for Papago Wells. But he wasn't the only one. Fleeing the fierce Churupati and his Apache warriors, other travelers had come there, too. And when the Apaches found them, they began a siege as relentless and unforgiving as the barren land - and just as inescapable.

Majestically it rose from the icy waters, the gateway to the awesome wilderness of Alaska. Sitka drew all brand of adventurers, con men, criminals, and pioneers—men such as trail-tough, battle-hardened Jean LaBarge. He left the swamps of the Susquehanna behind for the rugged beauty—and deadly challenges—of this frozen frontier. But the empire-hungry Russians had already established a foothold in Sitka and they wouldn’t give it up without a fierce and treacherous struggle that stretched from San Francisco to the palaces of St. Petersburg.

No one tells tales of the frontier better than Louis L'Amour, who portrays the human side of westward expansion - the good and the bad - before the days of law and order. Collected here are seven stories penned by America's favorite Western author.

Smoke Bellew enters a remote Mormon settlement only a jump ahead of a posse. Finding employment as a ranch hand working for a dowager Mormon, Smoke finds that his life undergoes a transformation and he is able to make her ranch a financial success, at the same time falling in love with her wanton daughter, Rebecca. But it is too good to last. The law follows him.

Louis L'Amour said that the West was no place for the frightened or the mean. It was a "big country needing big men and women to live in it." This volume presents nine of L'Amour's ever-popular short stories - history that lives forever.

Powder Basin, the broken, rugged country at the edge of a dry, forbidding desert, holds more hiding places than most men could find. Nat Bodine knows most of them; holed up in the Basin hills by a posse of over a hundred men, he needs them more than ever before. Jim Morton knows that if anyone is going to escape this posse, it's Bodine, just as he knows that Bodine is the kind of man who wouldn't commit the crime of which he's accused: and who, if forced, would seek his freedom in the savage desert sands.

Considine and Pete Runyon had once been friends, back in the days when both were cowhands. But when Runyon married the woman Considine loved, the two parted ways. Runyon settled down and became a sheriff. Considine took up robbing banks. Now Considine is planning a raid on the bank at Obaro, a plan that will pit him against Runyon...and lead to riches or suicide. The one thing he never counted on was meeting a strong, beautiful woman and her stubborn father, hell-bent on traveling alone through Apache territory to a new life.

Captain Sean Mulkerin comes home from the sea to find his family home in jeopardy. After the death of his father, Sean’s determined mother, Eileen, took it upon herself to run the sprawling Rancho Malibu - until a fire destroyed her hard-earned profits. Now, on the edge of financial ruin, Eileen hopes Sean can help them find a way out. The rumor is that her late husband found gold in the wild and haunted California hills, but the only clue to its whereabouts lies with an ancient, enigmatic Indian.

In The Lion Hunter and the Lady, the lion hunter is called Cat Morgan because of his reputation for being able to bag mountain lions alive to sell them to circuses and zoos. As the story opens, Cat is starring down one of the biggest mountain lions he has ever seen. Assisting him is old Long John Williams, a man who is a wizard with a rope, once Cat can lure the prey down onto the ground from a tree.

A brand new collection from Louis L'Amour, the legendary New York Times best-selling master of the short story. Here in Off the Mangrove Coast are fast-moving, historically detailed stories of the travails of extraordinary men and women struggling to break free, to capture fortune and fame, or find love. Here are the characters and the great tales that have made Louis L'Amour one of the world's most popular authors. Here are the works of a master craftsman which will live forever in the listeners' imaginations.

On a seldom-used smuggler's trail between Mexico and Austin, a man lies dying. Texas Ranger Chick Bowdrie takes the stranger's body to Valverde, the nearest town. Upon arriving, a crowd gathers, watchful and silent as Bowdrie tells his story to the sheriff. In the crowd is the beautiful blonde Rose Murray, owner of the RM Ranch. Rose explains to Bowdrie that she has reason to believe the stranger was coming to see her in order to right a terrible wrong. Twenty years ago, the Chilton Gang robbed her family.

Showdown Trail was first published in Giant Western magazine in winter 1948 under Louis L'Amour's Jim Mayo pseudonym. Years later, when L'Amour was first starting out as a paperback novelist, it was rewritten as The Tall Stranger. One of the earliest L'Amour westerns to be adapted for the movies, the film version starred Joel McCrea, Virginia Mayo, and Michael Ansara.

Join famed Texas Ranger Chick Bowdrie as he tracks the notorious John Queen, wanted for murder and kidnapping. Riding under an alias, Bowdrie joins up with Queen's ruthless gang to rescue the pretty niece of a powerful Texas judge. But when Queen discovers the lawman's true identity, Bowdrie must do some fast thinking and even faster shooting to beat the odds - five guns to one!

Ride with legendary Texas Ranger Chuck Bowdrie as he tracks the killers of an infamous Mexican outlaw, Zaparo, and 14 of his desperadoes. With nary a clue to the solution of this ruthless ambush, Bowdrie is led to the K-bar ranch, and the beautiful girlfriend of the last living member of Zaparo's gang only to find his prime suspect is a "friend" of the Texas Rangers!

Billy Dunbar is discovered and attacked by a band of Apaches while prospecting for gold with his two burros.