Copyright 2007 by McKinley Chaney - All rights reserved
PROLOG
Let me say that I’m not technically qualified to write Western novels. As most of my college professors never set foot in the real world of study where they taught, I wasn’t born in the West or reared in the West nor have I spent a lot of time in the West.
For many years, my career physically took me away from the land of my dreams, but my dreams remained there where the cows moved about, where the winds blew, where Roy and Gene, Bob Steel, Shamrock Ellison, Johnny Mac Brown, and Hopalong Cassidy rode the range and where all the men who rode across the silver screen worked and fought.
Reading Louis L’Amour, Zane Gray, Larry McMurtry, and a dozen other carefully chosen writers helped me focus my thoughts.
I’ve written songs of the country and western genre and sung them to empty walls as well as to wide-open spaces. I’ve twanged to hear the dogs howl and have driven a pickup for many years.
I’ve listened to all the songs about brute horses and mossy-horned cows and I’ve drifted with tumbling weeds. I bit the dust with Marty Robbins, hung with the highwaymen - Johnny, Willie and Waylon. I yodeled with Eddie Arnold, and harmonized with the Sons of the Pioneers.
I virtually tasted the desert air. I felt the dry thirst. I smelled lathered up horses. I rode line in snow country with Will Penny where the long winds blow. I ate beans and beef amid the shadows of canyon cliffs and felt the chill of coyote calls at twilight.
I dodged the arrows and felt the blade of my red brothers. I hunted and hid and starved, and heard the clank of a closed cell, but I’m not a bronc rider, a wrangle or a gun-toting lawman. I simply love the trail, the tale and the wail of the cowboy.
Come along with me on my trip from Austin to Boston. I believe you’ll feel the air of the hot West Texas plains and drink the cold dew of rising autumn suns. You’ll feel the bite of winter winds on the prairie and the pangs of good times, hard times and downright tough times. You’ll smell the train smoke. You’ll taste the ice from off the Great Lake. You’ll see the white man through red man’s eyes and see the red man through a white man’s thoughts. If you haven’t done so before, you’ll grow to appreciate a time that made the West a household word in every country around the globe.
