Dry Bones

DRY BONES
Historical Novel by Gerald McCathern
Second in the Ceebara Series

In 1875, Hide Town and Tascosa, in the Texas Panhandle, were known as the Sodom and Gomorrah of the plains. With 13 saloons and 500 prostitutes in Hidetown, and a slightly lesser number in Tascosa, sin was a thriving business. The nearest law was two hundred miles to the south, so the law of the Panhandle belonged to the man who could draw his Colt the fastest and shoot the straightest.

Hunters slaughtered millions of buffalo from 1865 to 1875, taking only their hides, leaving their bones to bleach white on the prairie grass of the Llano Estacado.

It was in this atmosphere that Colonel Jim Cole and his young side-kick, Ned Armstrong, fought to build their cattle empire. Having trailed 5,000 head of maverick longhorns from Central Texas in 1866, they made friends with Chief Quanah Parker and the Comanches, and established Ceebara, their ranch headquarters, on the banks of Red Deer Creek – just thirty miles north of Hide Town.

As Indians were pushed back into Indian Territory, cowboys replaced the indians and the longhorns replaced the buffalo. The other ranchers began to covet this land of free grass, and hundreds of thousands of longhorns were trailed in and began to encroach upon CeebaraÕs boundaries.

When a brand of renegade Comanches raid Ceebara and take the ColonelÕs grandson captive Quanah Parker returns to the Llano Estacado to help rescue the boy.

Dry Bones introduces the reader to all aspects of life on the frontier – buffalo hunters, Indian warfare, cattle drives, rustlers, outlaws, gunfighters, and painted ladies in the lawless towns. As in his novel, Horns, McCathern weaves a web of western intrigue around actual historical characters and events, equal to stories written by Louis L’Amour.

Read chapter 1 of Dry Bones for free here.

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