Before they lit up the silver screen, these frontier adventures lived first on the page – the gunmen, outlaws, and lawmen who rode hard across a vanished American country.
Many of Hollywood's most beloved cowboy pictures began as short fiction, and this companionable gathering brings those original stories together for a new generation of readers. Here are the drifters and desperadoes, the cattle drives and dusty saloons, that shaped a whole mythology of the frontier. Written by some of the finest storytellers the form has known, they carry all the grit, honour, and open-country romance that made the Western endure.