It was high hot noon on the Casket Ridge. Its very scant shade was restricted to a few dwarf Scotch firs, and was so perpendicularly cast that Leonidas Boone, seeking shelter from the heat, was obliged to draw himself up under one of them, as if it were an umbrella. Occasionally, with a boy's perversity, he permitted one bared foot to protrude beyond the sharply marked shadow until the burning sun forced him to draw it in again with a thrill of satisfaction....

The defining stories from one of America’s great wits
In the mid-nineteenth century, the Wild West grabbed ahold of American consciousness and never let go. With the discovery of gold, all eyes and wagons turned westward.
This collection of stories brings readers back to the American frontier. In “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” when a Native American woman dies in childbirth, the miners take it upon themselves to raise...

A collection of stories and poems about the West.