Johnny D. Boggs – författare

They sing songs about Matthew Johnson. The hero of dime novels, Matt won national fame during a range war in Idaho when he shot and killed an outlaw—and former saddle pal. But the past seventeen years have been an alcoholic blur rather than a heroic journey. Gone are the days when he was a free-wheeling cowboy, swapping poems with his best friend on the cattle ranges. The West has modernized—and practically disappeared—when Matt arrives in Denver in 1894 as the newly appointed US marshal for the state of Colorado.

The cowboy turned lawman inherits a state on the brink of collapse. The silver crash has ruined the economy, railroaders are striking, a range war is looming, corruption is rampant, and a rumored gold strike on the Southern Ute reservation threatens to turn into a bloodbath. Slowly, Matt realizes why he got the job. His supporters figure that the man who killed Jeff Hancock will either stay too drunk to realize what’s happening or take their bribes and look the other way. After all, the songs being sung about Matthew Johnson these days are more insulting than glorifying. Instead of the hero who stopped a range war, he is usually thought of as a man who murdered his best friend in exchange for the appointment as Idaho’s US marshal. And he hasn’t been sober in years.

What no one has counted on is the love of a woman who has had her own share of hard times and bad decisions. Or the fact that there’s a special breed of man who will fight with his last breath to regain his dignity and self-respect. If Matt can overcome his demons and past, schoolkids might start singing a new verse to an old song.

William Lee Braden was no secessionist, no slave owner. In fact, when the polls opened in Jacksboro, Texas, on February 23, 1861, Braden rode twelve miles up Lost Creek from his small ranch not only to vote against secession, but on his ballot, right next to his signature, he wrote For the Union forever. But come the fall of 1861, William Lee Braden rode off to join his brother Jacob in Harrisburg to fight, not for the Confederacy, but rather to defend the state of Texas from invasion and occupation.

Braden left behind him his wife, Martha Jane Pierce Braden, and his six-year-old son, Pierce Jonathan Braden. Certainly, one of the things Wil Braden, as well as the others from Jack County who had joined the army, had overlooked was that the warlike Kiowas and Comanches would seize the opportunity to wage a series of raids against the undefended ranches and farms they had left behind.

Unlike many of the men who went off to war, Wil would return to Texas four years later with scars he tried to keep hidden and no desire to talk about his war experience.

In 1913, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Lawrence, Kansas, Massacre, former bushwhacker Cole Younger stands before a preacher at a tent revival.

“I was, I remain, and I will always be a wicked man,” Younger states, taking a step toward salvation. And for a man like Cole Younger, there is much to confess.

Tormented by Southern partisans, Missouri farm boy Caleb Cole joins the Union’s Eighteenth Missouri. About the same time, down on the Texas coast, violin-playing Ryan McCalla, from a well-to-do family, enlists in the Confederacy’s Second Texas—mainly in the spirit of adventure—with some friends.

The two teenagers are about to grow up quickly.

Fate will bring the two together—along with a teenage girl from Corinth, Mississippi, when the Confederate and Union armies clash at Shiloh, Tennessee, and then again in the town of Corinth.

They will learn that war is far from glorious.

“That was the year we had no food.” It’s the spring of 1864, and times are hard in Washington County, Arkansas, especially for thirteen-year-old Travis Ford. He hasn’t heard from his father, a sergeant in the Second Arkansas Cavalry, in months. His mother is struggling to make ends meet on the family farm and abandoned sawmill near Poison Spring. All Travis really wants to do is to follow his passion—make up adventure stories in the style of Alexandre Dumas. But the Civil War keeps getting in his way. Since his mother hails from Illinois and has Abolitionist leanings, the Ford family—including Travis’ twin sister, Edith, and their seven-year-old brother, Baby Hugh—has few friends to turn to for help, only eccentric Miss Mary Frederick, who owns a cotton plantation down the road, and Uncle Willard Ford, a slave trader in nearby Camden. For the most part, Anna Louella Ford and her children find themselves alone, and they are about to become even more isolated.

William Clarke Quantrill was a hated name during the War between the States by the Federals of the Union Army as well as by many non-combatants. Even the high command of the Confederacy distrusted him. But there were others who were passionate sympathizers. He was both friend and mentor‚ but also manipulator and opportunist.

Alistair Durant was someone who came to know him in all these guises. Durant was a young Confederate soldier‚ captured by the Yankees‚ and released when he took an oath never again to bear arms against the Union. He had a long walk back to his home in Clay County, Missouri. It is on this trek that Alistair meets another youngster‚ Beans Kimbrough.

The two become companions and then friends on the way to Clay County, and it is there that Beans will introduce Alistair to a man calling himself Charley Hart. Hart has a fantastic plan—to organize a militia to fight against the Federals.

The South Carolina backcountry is no place for a young girl to grow up in the 1760s, but sixteen-year-old Emily Stewart wouldn’t have it any other way. She loves the settlement of Ninety Six where her father Breck Stewart runs a tavern with his family, including Emily’s embittered older brother, Donnan. But there’s much to fear, too. Gangs of murderers, thieves, and robbers terrorize the country with impunity. Pleas to the government in Charlestown fall on deaf ears. As the savagery continues, Breck Stewart is finally forced to take a stand, forming a vigilante group called the Cane Creek Regulators. The settlers take the law into their own hands—even though such an act will be considered treason and could land everyone riding with the vigilantes in a colonial prison—or on the gallows.

The reality of frontier life in Kansas in 1872 becomes brutally clear to twelve-year-old Coady McIlvain when his father is scalped by hostile Indians and Coady is taken prisoner. Coady is determined to escape and does so, falling in with a buffalo sharpshooter named Dylan Griffith, whom he sees as the embodiment of his hero, Buffalo Bill Cody, a role in which the circumspect Griffith feels himself totally inadequate.

The two face real adventure surviving the unforgiving terrain with Coady''s former captors on their trail and with outlaw Comancheros to be avoided.

In The Big Fifty—another name for the famous Sharps rifle—Johnny D. Boggs has created a gripping Western story with constant juxtapositions between the myths and legends created by Eastern storytellers out of the actual often brutal realities of frontier life.

Recalling his early life as a young cowboy, sixty-two-year-old Madison Carter remembers his first love: her name was Estrella O’Sullivan, and he met her the summer he turned sixteen back in 1873.

The summer of 1873 marked Madison’s last drive up what is now called the Chisholm Trail. It was the first time he tasted oysters and the only time he pinned on a badge. It was the summer of longhorns, miserable heat, friendship and betrayal, and murder. In the end it was the summer the whole world came crumbling down on the United States, and Madison’s world crashed too.

The summer of 1873 was the year Madison watched a bunch of men die. One of them was a man he killed, an encounter one never forgets.