The Winning of Barbara Worth (Harold Bell Wright, 1911)

Worth, a western banker, and a civil engineer called The Seer come upon a dead woman and a live baby when crossing the desert. Unable to have a child of his own, Worth adopts Barbara when all attempts to identify her have failed.

The Seer envisions taming the river and channeling it through the desert to turn it into arable farm land. It’s his life’s goal. Greenfield, an eastern financier, also envisions that, but whereas The Seer’s plan is altruistic, Greenfield’s is profit motivated. After making his initial report on the feasibility of the project, The Seer is fired and replaced with Greenfield’s nephew and almost son Willard.

Willard, a New England boy out west for the first time, initially is no different from his uncle in terms of what his goal is, but after falling in love with Barbara, he’s come to appreciate the desert and the ranchers come to settle it as Barbara does.

The company’s new water works were built as cheaply as possible to not cut a penny more than necessary into the profits. Worth and Willard both know that the situation is dangerous. An unusually high flood from the spring thaw in the mountains could destroy it and all the work that’s gone into the town.

With his own fortune, Worth sets about building a parallel town to the company’s—one built to last. Greenfield, meanwhile, tries every underhanded trick to force him into bankruptcy. It causes a falling out between him and Willard, leading to Willard being disowned.

And the flood does come. The company’s new town is washed away in a matter of hours and the farm land submerged beneath a vast inland sea. Greenfield had almost succeeded at ruining Worth but Willard thwarts him at the last minute. Barbara, who it turns out is really Greenfield’s niece, accepts Willard’s marriage proposal.

Inscription: Tucked into the last page is a 1940 newspaper clipping about Texas growing half of the world’s supply of roses.

Stranger from the Tonto (Zane Grey, 1956)

A dying outlaw entrusts his new friend with getting his chief’s daughter away from the rustler gang. She’s always been shielded from her father’s activities but she’s no longer a little girl and she can’t be spared any longer.

A very posthumous Zane Grey novel, but unlike Shadow on the Trail, which got progressively fragmented as it went on, Stranger from the Tonto is seemingly finished. I only say seemingly because it’s incredibly short and the plot is straight as an arrow.

No inscriptions.

Arizona Ames (Zane Grey, 1932)

When Arizona Ames kills his sister’s rapist, he goes on the lam and becomes a sort of knight errant, drifting across the west, solving everyone’s problems along the way. The solution is always shooting the bad guy.

Inscription: On the front flyleaf, “To Harold From Julius ‘Xmas 1936’”

Horse Thief Trail (Frederick R. Bechdolt, 1932)

Bob’s horses are stolen by a band of horse thieves led by Old Man Rose. Bob infiltrates the band but falls in love with Rose’s foster daughter Judith. Rose claims that Bob’s friend Jack killed her father, but surprise, he did it himself. After a stand-off, Rose dies, Jack is vindicated, and Bob and Judith marry.

Inscriptions: Presented to the Rangeley, Maine public library on May, 1955, book #21852.

The Winds of Chance (Rex Beach, 1918)

Pierce Phillips is on his way to Dawson during the Klondike Gold Rush. He believes himself to have quite reached his manhood, and perhaps he has in years, but he’s still very much an inexperienced boy when it comes to his outlook on the world, and especially his outlook on women. To him, there’s a dichotomy—good girls and bad girls—without any nuance or complexity.

He falls very much in love with Hilda, the Countess of Courteau, who’s on the Klondike trail not to mine for gold but to get rich a safer way by purchasing a hotel, dismantling it, and building it anew in Dawson. She’s entirely unlike his idea of women, with an independence and strength of character he finds almost inconceivable. To his horror, she tells him she won’t marry him. For one, he’s just a child and she’s many years older than him; and two, while they’ve long been separated, she’s still married to Count Courteau and sees no pressing reason to get a divorce. This is entirely inconceivable. His life blasted, he intends on becoming a drunkard. After exactly one glass of whiskey, he finds himself hired onto Morris Best’s team, on their way to Dawson to open a dance hall, and claimed by Laure, one of the chorus girls.

In Dawson, Pierce abandons his gold mining plans to take a job at the dance hall, falling into that world and failing to see how it’s alienating him from his former friends and inhibiting him from making new ones. Laure, grown intensely jealous of Pierce, who only pays her the time of day when he’s drunk, conspires with the Count to frame him for the theft of $200 worth of gold.

He’s arrested and taken to the barracks, but the Chief Mountie’s daughter has fallen in love with him and, with the help of the Countess, has taken up his case. The Count is forced to confess, but he’s then killed by the other men in his gang, the two McCaskeys. Napoleon Doret, the French-Canadian trapper and guide (who we last met in The Barrier), leads the manhunt to bring back the fugitives and clear Pierce’s name.

No inscriptions.

Knights of the Range (Zane Grey, 1936)

Fresh back from school in the east, Holly Ripple assumes control of the Don Carlos Rancho after her father’s death. They’re beset by cattle rustlers and horse thieves, but Holly forms a posy of hard-fighting cowboys who manage to kill the ringleader of the outlaws. Not a bad western, though it couldn’t be any more generic.

No inscriptions.

The Light of Western Stars (Zane Grey, 1914)

Madeline goes out west to find herself, does; marries a cowboy, does; and saves him from execution by the Mexican army, does. A by-the-numbers western romance that still somehow manages to fill 376 pages,

Inscriptions: “C. Howard Stepp, East Haven, Conn. Nov 5th 1927” on both the front flyleaf and rear end paper.

The Valley of Twisted Trails (W.C. Tuttle, 1931)

The V Bar and W Bar ranches have both been losing cattle to cattle rustlers. The W Bar owner hires detectives, three of them, but each are killed within a week of arriving on the range. They both buy from either the TJ ranch or the Double Diamond, both across the border in Mexico. Sad Sontag is there to buy stock for a Wyoming ranch, but unknown to either V Bar or W Bar, he’s also a detective.

His findings are pretty predictable. (To be fair, this isn’t really a mystery novel — it just has elements of one.) As quickly as the detectives were killed, it had to be an inside job. The foremen of both the V Bar and W Bar are in on it. They take their own cattle a resell them back to the Double Diamond/TJ. You’ll notice how easily either a V or W brand could be converted to two diamonds and a bar into TJ.

No inscriptions.

The Thundering Herd (Zane Grey, 1925)

Tom Doan travels to Texas to hunt for buffalo hide. On the plains, he meets and falls in love with Millie Fayre, an orphan in the care of her stepfather, who’s part of a gang of hide thieves. Tensions mount in the gang about how the profits will be split, one thing leads to another, and eventually everyone has shot everyone else to death. Millie, now alone, is chased by Comanches until she’s saved by being caught up in a herd of stampeding buffalo. Tom believes Millie is dead and stays on the plain hunting for more than a year before returning to town and discovering that she’s been waiting for him.

Inscriptions: On the flyleaf, “C. Howard Stepf / East Haven / Conn / Xmas Present from Timothy / 1926”.

Mavericks (William MacLeod Raine, 1911)

Phyllis’s rancher father has been plagued by cattle rustlers. Everyone in the area believes the newly arrived homesteaders are the culprits, particularly Larry Keller. In reality, Keller is an undercover Ranger sent to ferret out the rustlers, who are actually a gang of locals led by the nominee sheriff, Brill Healy. Healy attempts to frame Keller and get him lynched but is thwarted time and again by Phyllis, who’s fallen in love with Keller.

Inscriptions: On the flyleaf, “(indecipherable) to Grace Packard please return (indecipherable)”. Written with three different pens but all in the same handwriting.