Showing results by author "Bill Gulick" in All Categories

America's richest legends come from the frontier - from the land where the events of a single moment might erase the lines between law and lawlessness, between safety and mortal danger, between heroes and villains. The carefully selected stories in this collection are vibrant proof that the great American West is a fertile ground to storytellers. Here is the most varied collection of short stories by 17 highly acclaimed Western writers.

Based on an historical event that, from start to finish, was a total carnival of errors, The Hallelujah Trail is one of the old West's most hilarious adventures. In the late 1800's, a train of 80 freight wagons from Wallingham and Company left Julesburg bound for the mining camps at Denver, in the Colorado Territory. What is unusual is the 2700 cases of imported French Champagne and 1600 barrels of Philadelphia Whisky they carry.

Just as the big trees of the Pacific Northwest inspired the legend of Paul Bunyan, so did the Palouse Hills of southeastern Washington--where fantastic fields of wheat were raised on incredibly steep slopes--spawn tall tales about farmers, steamboat men, and the ingenious methods they used to get their grain to market. Though thirty-three-mule hitches and headers (whose downhill wheels were three times larger than the uphill ones) solved the harvesting problems, transporting the sacked grain two thousand vertical feet down to the steamboat landings took sheer genius.