Horns

HORNS
Historical Novel by Gerald McCathern
First in the Ceebara Ranch Series

Jim Cole, a one armed ex-confederate colonel, and his young side-kick Ned Armstrong, battle the weather, Indians, buffalo hunters and the army to carve out a cattle empire in the high grass country of the Llano Estacado during the years of 1865 to 1875. At a time when no other white man would enter this Comanche stronghold, Cole and Armstrong made friends with the great Comanche chief, Quanah Parker and trailed five thousand head of Texas longhorns from central Texas to the headwaters of the Red River and established the Ceebara Ranch. Their peaceful coexistence with the Comanches was severed when the buffalo hunters invaded and began slaughtering the estimated fifty million head of buffalo, taking only the hide and tongue and allowing the rest to rot. Caught up in this war between the Indians, the hunters and the army, Cole and Armstrong and their Ceebara family fought valiantly to protect their land. In the style of Louis L’Amour, McCathern weaves an exciting fictional story around historical facts that every lover of western fiction will enjoy.

The Llano Estacado, Staked Plains, was the last stronghold for the ferocious Comanche Indians. Located in the Texas Panhandle, it was also the grazing ground for an estimated fifty million head of migrating buffalo in the mid-nineteenth century.

Quanah Parker, half-white Comanche Chief, organized the Plains tribes — the Cheyenne, Kiowa-Apache and the Comanches — into a formidable army to resist encroachment into the Indians’ sacred hunting grounds by white buffalo hunters, cattle ranchers and the U.S. cavalry.

Horns is the story of the bloody ten year war between these four factions from 1865 to 1875, a war to gain control of these huge grazing lands.

McCathern, a native of the Texas Panhandle, brings to life the story of the settling of the last frontier in the state of Texas as no other writer has ever done. His no-nonsense style of writing keeps the reader entranced from the first page when Colonel Jim Cole loses his arm to cannon fire in the Civil War to the final chapter when the last Comanche is forced from the Llano Estacado onto the hated Indian reservation and the huge buffalo herds are slaughtered and are replaced by the magnificent longhorn cattle.

Read chapter 1 of Horns for free here.

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