A master of narrative momentum and suspense, Zane Grey sweeps readers into his stories and makes them feel that things are out of control, that boundaries are being burst. In Riders of the Purple Sage, the most famous novel of the American West, Grey creates a hero of epic proportions, a villain of legendary evil and a world in which the landscape is rendered with such force that it seems to express thoughts and feelings, to become a character in its own right. Indeed, Riders of the Purple Sage derives much of its depth and power from passions whose forbidden and...

Texas. They took the most contrary bunch of frontiersmen, ranchers, farmers, cowpokes, shiftless no-accounts, shootists rascals, and politicians, jumbled them together, and somehow formed a state. They called it Texas, but for defenseless women and children, it was hell. Texas Rangers. Although they were outnumbered a thousand to one, the Texas Rangers fought a holding action against the complete breakdown of law and order, often paying for peace with their lives. But one county held out against attack after attack, a place so mean that a saint would have turned bad. Into this valley of death...

Told by a master storyteller who, according to critic Russell Nye, "combined adventure, action, violence, crisis, conflict, sentimentalism, and sex in an extremely shrewd mixture," Riders of the Purple Sage is a classic of the Western genre. It is the story of Lassiter, a gunslinging avenger in black, who shows up in a remote Utah town just in time to save the young and beautiful rancher Jane Withersteen from having to marry a Mormon elder against her will. Lassiter is on his own quest, one that ends when he discovers a secret grave on Jane's grounds. " Zane Grey's] popularity was...

In a quiet corner of the stately little city of Wheeling, West Va., stands a monument on which is inscribed: By authority of the State of West Virginia to commemorate the siege of Fort Henry, Sept 11, 1782, the last battle of the American Revolution, this tablet is here placed. Had it not been for the heroism of a girl the foregoing inscription would never have been written, and the city of Wheeling would never have existed. From time to time I have read short stories and magazine articles which have been published about Elizabeth Zane and her famous exploit; but they are unreliable in some...

Jane Withersteen gazed down the wide purple slope with dreamy and troubled eyes. A rider had just left her and it was his message that held her thoughtful and almost sad, awaiting the churchmen who were coming to resent and attack her right to befriend a Gentile. She wondered if the unrest and strife that had lately come to the little village of Cottonwoods was to in-volve her. And then she sighed, remembering that her father had founded this remotest border settlement of southern Utah and that he had left it to her. She owned all the ground and many of the cottages. Withersteen House was...

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - Joan Randle reined in her horse on the crest of the cedar ridge, and with remorse and dread beginning to knock at her heart she gazed before her at the wild and looming mountain range. Jim wasn't fooling me, she said. "He meant it. He's going straight for the border ... Oh, why did I taunt him!" It was indeed a wild place, that southern border of Idaho, and that year was to see the ushering in of the wildest time probably ever...

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - BUT the man's almost dead. The words stung John Hare's fainting spirit into life. He opened his eyes. The desert still stretched before him, the appalling thing that had overpowered him with its deceiving purple distance. Near by stood a sombre group of men. Leave him here, said one, addressing a gray-bearded giant. "He's the fellow sent into southern Utah to spy out the cattle thieves. He's all but dead. Dene's out-laws are after...