18 books like The Long Valley
The Crusade of the Excelsior
The speaker, though apparently more at his ease at sea, was in dress and appearance fully as unnautical as Banks. As he leaned over the railing, his white, close-fitting trousers and small patent-leather boots gave him a jaunty, half-military air, which continued up to the second button of his black frock-coat, and then so utterly changed its character that it was doubtful if a greater contrast…
Shares: American Short stories, Westerns, Social life and customs
A Sappho of Green Springs
The door of the editorial room of the "Excelsior Magazine" began to creak painfully under the hesitating pressure of an uncertain and unfamiliar hand. This continued until with a start of irritation the editor faced directly about, throwing his leg over the arm of his chair with a certain youthful dexterity. With one hand gripping its back, the other still grasping a proof-slip, and his pencil in…
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Colonel Starbottle's client, and some other people
Everyone's favorite bloviating attorney makes a triumphant return to the law profession in the title story of this charming collection from Bret Harte. Colonel Starbottle takes on a client named Jo Corbin, who has committed a grievous crime and works out a convoluted plan of repentance.
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Openings in the Old Trail
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…
Shares: California, Westerns, Social life and customs
Law of the Desert Born
This first-rate collection of short stories by the incomparable Louis L’Amour showcases the legendary writer at his very spinning a fascinating and wholly authentic set of unforgettable tales. In these extraordinary stories, we meet a man who is forced to defend himself by taking another’s life—and must pay for his actions in a most punishing manner; a young thrill-seeker who finally finds a…
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Maruja
Morning was breaking on the high road to San Jose. The long lines of dusty, level track were beginning to extend their vanishing point in the growing light; on either side the awakening fields of wheat and oats were stretching out and broadening to the sky. In the east and south the stars were receding before the coming day; in the west a few still glimmered, caught among the bosky hills of the…
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Condensed novels
The Dodds were dead. For twenty year they had slept under the green graves of Kittery churchyard. The townfolk still spoke of them kindly. The keeper of the alehouse, where David had smoked his pipe, regretted him regularly, and Mistress Kitty, Mrs. Dodd's maid, whose trim figure always looked well in her mistress's gowns, was inconsolable.  On the death of his parents, Faraday Little was…
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On the Frontier
It was noon of the 10th of August, 1838. The monotonous coast line between Monterey and San Diego had set its hard outlines against the steady glare of the Californian sky and the metallic glitter of the Pacific Ocean. The weary succession of rounded, dome-like hills obliterated all sense of distance; the rare whaling vessel or still rarer trader, drifting past, saw no change in these rusty…
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Selected Stories of Bret Harte
The life of Bret Harte divides itself, without adventitious forcing, into four quite distinct parts. First, we have the precocious boyhood, with its eager response to the intellectual stimulation of cultured parents; young Bret Harte assimilated Greek with amazing facility; devoured voraciously the works of Shakespeare, Dickens, Irving, Froissart, Cervantes, Fielding; and, with creditable…
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The story of California
Contents
The Sign at Six (1912)
The Gray Dawn (1915)
The Mountains (1904)
Blazed Trail Stories and Stories of the Wild Life (1899)
The Adventures of Bobby Orde (1908)
The Westerners (1901)
The Call of the North
The Rules of the Game (1910)
The Claim Jumpers: A Romance (1901)
The Riverman (1908)
The Land of Footprints (1913)
The Forty-Niners (1918)
The Leopard Woman (1916)
Conjuror's House…
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The lonesome gods
Here is the fascinating story of Johannes Verne, a young man left to die by his vengeful grandfather, rescued by outlaws and raised in part by the Indians of the desert. Strengthened by the love of two women--Miss Nesselrode, whose mysterious past fires her ambitions for the future, and Meghan, a willful young beauty--Verne grows to become a rugged adventurer, a man strong enough to embrace the…
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Wayside Courtships
The train drew out of the great Van Buren Street depot at 4. 30 of a dark day in late October. A tall young man, with a timid look in his eyes, was almost the last one to get on, and his pale face wore a worried look as he dropped into an empty seat and peered out at the squalid buildings reeling past in the mist. The buildings grew smaller, and vacant lots appeared stretching away in flat…
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Frontier Stories
Just where the red track of the Los Gatos road streams on and upward like the sinuous trail of a fiery rocket until it is extinguished in the blue shadows of the Coast Range, there is an embayed terrace near the summit, hedged by dwarf firs. At every bend of the heat-laden road the eye rested upon it wistfully; all along the flank of the mountain, which seemed to pant and quiver in the oven-like…
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All the Pretty Horses
All the Pretty Horses is a novel by American author Cormac McCarthy published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1992. Its romanticism (in contrast to the bleakness of McCarthy's earlier work) brought the writer much public attention. It was a bestseller, and it won both the U.S. National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Along with The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998), it…
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Valley of Wild Horses
The tall young cowpuncher known as Panhandle Smith had roped, gambled and fought his way from Montana to New Mexico, but Marco was the most lawless place he had ever seen. And when Panhandle faced down Dick Hardman, he knew he had to destroy Hardman to save his woman and his life.
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Lost Pueblo
A tale of romance in the Old West. The heroine is Jane Endicott -- a spirited young woman who travels to Arizona with her father. She falls in love with this rough and rugged frontier -- not to mention the eligible young cowboys.
Her father, rushing in where angels fear to tread, tries to match her with the son of an old friend. Complications arise.
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The Lost Wagon Train
The story of a Civil War soldier finding his humanity in the face of horrible savagery.Emerging from the Civil War a shamed and broken man, Stephen Latch turns to a life of thievery and murder. Still hoping to uphold the values of the Confederacy, Latch sets his sights on the wealth of resources pouring westward from the northern United States, putting together a band of ruthless misfits to help…
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Sally Dows
What had been in the cool gray of that summer morning a dewy country lane, marked only by a few wagon tracks that never encroached upon its grassy border, and indented only by the faint footprints of a crossing fox or coon, was now, before high noon, already crushed, beaten down, and trampled out of all semblance of its former graciousness. The heavy springless jolt of gun-carriage and caisson…
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