About the Book

In the spring of 1871, young Jonathan Calhoun sets out on a stagecoach from New York City to the Cripple Creek Cattle Ranch in Armadillo Flats, Texas -- for an adventure of a life time. He has taken a summer job herding 2,500 long horn cattle on the Chisholm Trail to Abilene, Kansas.

Jonathan is leaving behind his socialite fiancée and his job working as an artist for his father’s magazine to draw sketches of the trail ride and the cowboys. Jonathan has no idea how his life will change from this one summer. He expects the cowboys to be seasoned older, unfriendly, grisly men, but finds them surprisingly smart, hardworking young men around his age, and full of pranks. Rattlesnake, Whiskey Bill, Frank, George, Ned, Charley, Bean Belly, Curley Kid, Leon, and Cookie, the cook, will become the best friends he ever had and will teach him how to be a cowboy.

At the end of the summer, he must return to New York City and his old stagnant, unfulfilled life –and marriage to Rebecca Ann. He finds, after a time, he no longer belongs in the city. He belongs in Texas with the cowboys.

He goes back, finds his friends and the cowboy way of life, and never looks back. His life becomes alive with this new journey and challenges and exciting people. He meets lawmen and outlaws--Wild Bill Hickok, Wyatt Earp, James Harden, and Claire, the Soiled Dove. Missing the land and the cattle, Jonathan and some of his friends ride to Wyoming to start their own small ranch, but the cold and snow of the Winter of Death in in 1886 wipes out all the cattle.

Through the next years, Jonathan Calhoun learns the real value of life, of a day of hard work, worth of true friends. Longing to go south and start over, he and his friends ride to Oklahoma

Territory to make the Cherokee Outlet Land Run in 1893, and hopefully find some land and settle down.