Buckskin Run (L'Amour, 1981)

Louis L’Amour. Buckskin Run. (1981) Collection of short stories, which display all of L’Amour’s plots and characters. I enjoyed reading them. L’Amour understood the genre he was writing, and strove to make them historically accurate in setting and events. Here, he added brief stories of real people and events, which show that fiction’s need for plausibility tends to make reality stranger.

The title refers to a creek. A dispute between a settler (claiming the land legally) and the local cattle baron (pasturing his cattle illegally on government land) focuses on the water and grazing around it, complicated by rumours of gold and old unsolved murders, and of course the romantic subplot. Typical L’Amour tale.

** to ***