In a real-life version of Little Big Man comes Indian captive narrative of Herman Lehmann. He was captured as a boy in 1870 and lived for nine years among the Apaches and Comanches. Long considered one of the best captivity stories from the period, Lehmann came to love the people and the life. Only through the gentle persuasion of famed Comanche chief, Quanah Parker, was Lehmann convinced to remain with his white family once he was returned to them.

In 1851, Olive Oatman was a 13-year-old pioneer traveling west toward Zion, with her Mormon family. Within a decade, she was a white Indian with a chin tattoo, caught between cultures. The Blue Tattoo tells the harrowing story of this forgotten heroine of frontier America. Orphaned when her family was brutally killed by Yavapai Indians, Oatman lived as a slave to her captors for a year before being traded to the Mohave, who tattooed her face and raised her as their own.

It is 1870 and Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd travels through northern Texas, giving live readings to paying audiences hungry for news of the world. An elderly widower who has lived through three wars and fought in two of them, the captain enjoys his rootless, solitary existence. In Wichita Falls, he is offered a $50 gold piece to deliver a young orphan to her relatives in San Antonio. Four years earlier, a band of Kiowa raiders killed Johanna's parents and sister; sparing the little girl, they raised her as one of their own.

Embark on an unforgettable journey into the heart of the American West with the Sager family, pioneers who braved the infamous Oregon Trail. In the face of tragedy, Henry and Naomi Sager's seven children found themselves orphaned not once, but twice—first on the treacherous trail, and later under the care of Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, courageous missionaries in the untamed lands of what is now Washington.

The Colley family is made of modest farmers in the Missouri Ozarks. Although Southerners, the Colleys try to remain neutral, a fact ignored by the Union militia who confiscate their livestock, burn their farm, and arrest their daughter, Adair, on charges of “enemy collaboration”. Yet as this innocent young woman soon discovers, fate can have a double edge. While imprisoned, she falls in love with her interrogator, a Union major who helps her escape.

On May 19, 1836, Fort Parker in Texas was overwhelmed by a band of Comanche Indians. Some residents were brutally murdered, others taken prisoner. Among those captured was 11-year-old Cynthia Parker, who would remain with the Comanche for 24 years and give birth to famed Chief Quanah.

In the summer of 1846, the Army of the West marched through Santa Fe, en route to invade and occupy the Western territories claimed by Mexico. Fueled by the new ideology of “Manifest Destiny,” this land grab would lead to a decades-long battle between the United States and the Navajos, the fiercely resistant rulers of a huge swath of mountainous desert wilderness.

From 1875 to 1881, James B. Gillett served as one of the Texas Rangers, the lawmen of the Old West. Looking back 40 years later, he tells of his numerous clashes with Native American warriors in the West Texas borderlands, of the Mason County War and the Horrell-Higgins feud, and of dangerous missions into Mexico. Originally published in 1921.

"Big-Foot Wallace” is better known throughout Texas as an Indian-fighter, hunter, and ranger, than any one, perhaps, now living in the State; which is saying a good deal when the great number who have acquired more or less notoriety in that way is taken into consideration. Few men now living, I am confident, have witnessed as many stirring incidents, had more “hair-breadth escapes,” or gone through more of the hardships and perils of a border life. 

Authoritative and immediate, this is the classic account of the most powerful of the American Indian tribes. T. R. Fehrenbach traces the Comanches' rise to power, from their prehistoric origins to their domination of the high plains for more than a century until their demise in the face of Anglo-American expansion.