For Kelton fans, this audio like all of his others should not be missed. Unlike most authors, Mr. Kelton is a wonderful speaker. This audio elaborates on his writing style and the way he combines history, myth and folklore in his books. It offers valuable insights into his books and the way he borrows stories he has heard and people he has met for use in his outstanding novels like The Time It Never Rained, The Day the Cowboys Quit, etc. Plus a listener realizes what a fine, generous, and modest individual Mr. Kelton actually is which will further enrich each rereading of his books. I can't recommend this audio too highly. Any aspiring writer or fan of Western American literature will love listening to it as I do.

Lt. David Buckalew and what few men he has left are on their way back to Texas after being beaten by the Union Army. On the way they find out about a bunch of weapons and powder hidden on a ranch. They decide to capture it and take it back with them to help their cause. They are only 20 men strong and this number will drop. The weapons and powder are hidden on a ranch owned by people who back the Union. They are successful it starting toward Texas with it but it is a long way from over. Bucklaew and his few men have to fight the people for the Union also a group of Indians led by Comanchero Floyd Bearfield, who wants the stuff to sell. Bucklaew is a green Lt., therefore, his men may more attention to Sergeant Noley Mitchell than to him. Can he get the material back to Texas? Will the men ever respect him? The book moves fast and will hold your attention. Some people get killed you don't want to and some live you don't want to. A good Western book, but then Kelton usually writes a good one.

Portraits is a good word to describe the artful way the author describes his subjects, both natural and human in this collection of stories about the Trans-Pecos. For a backpacker like myself, the story about the solo hike in the Guadalupes reflects my own feelings about the activity better than I ever could, and in fact inspired my own trip to the same place where I had much the same experiences. I collect books on the Big Bend area, and this is the best I've read. If you want a book with a soul but no sentimentality, this it. Reminds me somewhat of David Lavender.

As a relative newcomer to the Texas Plains-Panhandle region, I found The Texas Panhandle Frontier quite helpful in advancing my understanding of the forces that crafted its culture. Rathjen artfully begins with a geographic review of the llano flat lands and the canyons that splay out from them. He moves chronologically from the Paleo Indian cultures through the Spanish explorers, the Anglo-American scientist-explorers, the historic Indian cultures, the buffalo hunters, and finally, the U.S. military conquest. The Panhandle region was discovered by Europeans twice-first by Coronado and his followers from Spanish New Mexico and later by the Anglo scientists, such as James Abert and Randolph Marcy. Yet, the wearying sameness of the region, its extreme weather, and paucity of water intimidated settlers, leaving it open through the middle 19th century for the free run of semi-nomadic Comanches and other native groups.

Coming to this region from El Paso, I wondered why the Spanish influence was nearly absent from the Plains-Panhandle. Rathjen shows how the area today might have been oriented toward New Mexico if the Spanish explorers of the 16th and 17th centuries had seen the region as a place of settlement rather than as an expanse to be crossed in the search for gold. Ultimately in the 19th century, as more choice lands were claimed, the region attracted Texas cattlemen and ranchers who saw financial opportunity in the emptiness. Hence, the region today is oriented east to the heart of Texas and even north toward Dodge City, Kansas.

Rathjen suggests that the tough barren landscape drew settlers who were equally as tough. His book helps a reader to understand how an intense and often uncompromising Christian Bible-based culture took hold in an uncompromising region. The book also leads the outsider begrudgingly to admire this land and its relatively new residents, yet also to lament that its Native American peoples were not permitted to flourish and add a plurality to the region.

Rathjen deals sensitively with the various groups who crossed the land, crediting both the Indians and their Anglo adversaries with the intelligence and nobility of worthy opponents. In different ways each found a niche in a difficult land. He acknowledges the sometimes severe military tactics on both sides and also presents a dispassionate but sympathetic look at the buffalo slaughter of the late 1800s. Rathjen's prose is never overbearing, melodramatic, or intrusively opinionated. He allows readers to draw their own conclusions about the complex relationships between humans of different cultures, animals, and the environment that all must share.

The book is well written and engaged in its subject. Rathjen is to be commended for the way in which he periodically summarizes the chapters and draws meaningful conclusions. Passages like the following are especially insightful:

"Significantly the scientific exploration of the Texas Panhandle was exclusively financed and directed by the federal government and executed by its agents, and was in no way a function of state or private enterprise. Having occurred in a state that owned its public lands, this fact, in turn, suggests that the federal government was far more a factor in the development of the American West than has generally been supposed" (113).

The Texas Panhandle Frontier is a classic study of this region. It is an excellent companion to Walter Prescott Webb's The Great Plains, Dan Flores's Caprock Canyonlands, and Donald Worster's Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s. Rathjen provides a highly readable history of a part of the West that is indelibly woven into our American heritage.

I very seldom give out five star ratings, but Elmer Kelton gets them. I love his book, Buffalo Wagons, but if there's one that's nearly as good it's Texas Rifles. He created a superbly heroic character in Sam Cloud, and if anyone thinks the western died with L'Amour, you are WRONG. Between Elmer Kelton and Kirby Jonas, the western is very much alive. I hope everyone gets a chance to read these two authors. If you like Texas Rifles, read Kirby Jonas's The Dansing Star or Death of an Eagle for a super treat. These two are the best!

I have recently viewed and read the newest book by James Reynolds. There are just a few of the great western artists painting today with the attention given to the detail of that period. Great book Mr. Reynolds. I've always been a fan of yours...and enjoy reading, looking, and re-reading and re-looking at your art. Thanks...Norman D. Catlett

The Story: Rusty Shannon is a former Texas Ranger who has informally adopted a boy who had been kidnapped by the Comanches as an infant after they killed his parents. Andy lived with the Comanches for ten years and became one of them. Rusty tries to take the boy back (he wants to go back), but that doesn't go well, and Andy makes Comanche enemies. Meanwhile, this is right after the Civil War, and Texas is run by a Union (North) imposed government, but its citizens were divided, during and after the war, as to which side they supported, causing continuing friction. Rusty has enemies who want to push him off his farm, but he also has friends. One of those friends has a young son, who gets captured by the Comanches during a raid, and Andy, now sixteen, faces his past as he tries to rescue the boy.

Commentary: This is a rousing adventure tale full of realistic, interesting, three-dimensional characters (the good guys have their flaws and the bad guys have understandable motives), straightforward language, and a rich historical setting. I knew little about Texas right after the Civil War, but this book paints a pretty clear picture of those times.

I am not generally a fan of Westerns, but that could be changing.

A very entertaining, exciting, and morally uplifting book that would please any child or adult who likes a rip-roaring yarn! I love a good western and read this on a whim, then passed it on to my 14 year old son when he needed a book to read in class. He is not one to read for pleasure, but he really enjoyed this and went on to read other books of this genre, such as Larry McMurtry's "Lonesome Dove" series. So, educators, be sure to suggest this to your young readers, it will grab them hard, and be sure to read it yourself!

This was a great book and can be recommended to anyone. Kelton is neck and neck with Kirby Jonas as the two best western writers out there, and both of them could be read by even people who don't know yet that they're fans of the western. If you enjoyed Cloudy in the West and other Kelton books, be sure to check out Kirby Jonas, whom critics call The New Louis L'Amour. Between these two authors, we need no one else!

When a young man faces the death of a father, all the world becomes a stranger. Facing hardships at home and "loved ones" trying to get him, he must begin a new life. Elmer Kelton has written a clever Western that faces all mans worst fears: death of a family member, loss of home, loss of love, and even maybe loss of life? How he deals with these issues make life worth living! Against the back drop of Early Texas, this complex story unfolds. A great Western book that you can't put down.

The perceived merits of this book will depend a great deal on the critical standards the reader brings to it. Aficionados of the oat-burner genre will likely find it a notch above the general fare. More literary tastes will find it wanting. It is not nearly as elevated a book either thematically or stylistically as the afterword by Don Graham would suggest. That said, this is a book of some notable achievement in character definition and to a lesser extend action. Nonetheless, much of the plot is telegraphed and overdeveloped. Relationships between characters, especially the romantic relationships, are shallow and predictable. The book seems to be written for a formula audience taking a step upward. Literature is yet a step beyond.
Kelton clearly loves his theme of the Old West (and by extension all frontiers) disappearing around the ones who love it best as the modern world edges in. He also loves his old stalwarts of the vanishing world, Hewey Calloway, Snort Yarnell, and Boy Rasmussen. The other characters largely do not get the loving treatment or snippets of telling detail that make them as knowable and well-developed as the good old boys. Kelton does not lack for descriptive ability, but comes nowhere near someone like Cormac McCarthy in his novels with a western setting, or even a Larry McMurtry. Kelton clocks in somewhere around a good episode of "Gunsmoke."

The Good Old Boys takes the reader into the world of the early century cowboys that lived and worked on their horses. The men who were top in their field only to see their field melting away. I totally enjoyed every page, and when I saw the snobbish review of an elitist reviewer who said "Aficionados of the oat-burner genre will likely find it a notch above the general fare. More literary tastes will find it wanting. It is not nearly as elevated a book either thematically or stylistically as the afterword by Don Graham would suggest." I simply thought that poor person just doesn't understand! This work by Elmer Kelton depicts a time, a place, and a voice that many may not understand, and will not appreciate. I think that poor soul should not be reviewing "oat-burning genre" but those who live near the land will either remember or learn about another time. Seldom do you find such an original and wonderful story as "The Good Old Boys".

Elmer Kelton is in top form with "The Good Old Boys," a book I'll always remember for its remarkable characters and unusual story. Hewey Calloway struggles with the arrival of automobiles and technology... not unlike the struggle some of us have today with computers and a changed world.