Stories of the Old West: Tales of the Mining Camp, Cavalry Troop, & Cattle Ranch

The literature of the "Old" West is very old indeed, but stories from the region began to appear only after the Civil War, as the short story emerged as a major literary form and the West emerged as a separate, distinctly American culture. This collection brings together fifty of the best stories of the Old West by some of America's finest writers. From comic tales about California charlatans and prostitutes with hearts of gold to portrayals of tough, taciturn, and honorable cowboys and heroic cavalrymen; from razor-sharp stories of settlers struggling to survive in a savage land to the rare, sympathetic vision of American Indian culture, this is an indispensable collection of stories from an Old West always partly geographical, partly imagined.