I love reading Elmer Kelton Westerns because they sound like home to me. He was a Texan who wrote about Texas and he knew how Texans talked. His dialogue is spot-on perfect, among the best I've ever read. His characters are complex and never wholly black or white. His stories may not be as melodramatic as some, but they are more representative of life as it really was than those formulaic hero-versus-villain Westerns or those revisionist Westerns which portray a cynical ultra-violent world. The Western Writers of America named Kelton as the Greatest Western Writer of All Time.
Kelton based the beginning of this novel on an actual event--a strike in 1883 by cowboys on ranches in the Canadian River area of the Texas Panhandle. When the strike inevitably fails, the protagonist, one of the striking cowboys, tries to make it as a small-time cattleman, but the big ranchers (one of them a Yankee banker) want to drive out the small operators to reserve the open range for themselves, even hiring a "shootist" to threaten violence. Will the struggling underdogs be able to stand up to the rich and powerful? Has civilization reached far enough that the rules of law and order can prevail?
This is a depiction of Texas as it probably really was in that place and time, and it is excellent.
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I have not read all of Elmer Kelton's novels, but all I have read have been outstanding. I particularly recommend The Time It Never Rained, which takes place during the drought of the 1950s.
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