James Janke: 11 books

It may be cool way up north in Montana where cowhand Clay Braddock is headed, but at the moment he is riding through hot, parched desert country, and he stops in Green Valley for a beer for himself and water for his horse Nick. But the bartender has a chip on his shoulder, and the saloon has nothing...

Hank Weatherstone is the young, ambitious, and proud founder of a new one-vehicle stage line in southeastern Wyoming. He thinks he has only two passengers for his upcoming two-day run to Laramie from Fort Laramie and he expects an uneventful trip. But it gets complicated. First he is tricked...

Twenty-year-old Jeremiah Bacon has never fired a gun or even ridden a horse. He’s headed by train with his parents from Boston to San Francisco to start a career as a concert pianist. But his father is killed in a holdup of a Wells Fargo office in Point of Rocks, Wyoming, and Jeremiah swears...

Very late in the Civil War Confederate Colonel Thaddius Kingsley and the tattered remnants of his regiment board the steamboat West Wind in St. Joseph, Missouri. He tells Captain Zachary Cole that the war is lost and they are heading for the goldfields in Montana so they can return to their homes...

Young cowhand Matt Jenner has been persuaded by his much older cowboy partner Caleb Miller to sell their horses and head for Arizona by stagecoach before the harsh Wyoming winter sets in. And they are delighted to discover that also traveling - to Cheyenne at least - will be the very attractive Emily...

Owen Buchanan, along with his brother, Philo, his cousin, Willis, and a neighbor, Lucas, leave farming behind and rush west, enticed by the news of gold in the Black Hills. It’s a long walk with a bull train from Fort Pierre on the Missouri River to Deadwood. Near the end they rescue Dr. Hiram Gruenhagen,...

Bold and talented U.S. Deputy Marshal Ward Stockton is headed into the majestic Wind River Mountains (the Windies) of Wyoming Territory after the outlaw Casey Waite and his gang. In the rain he saves the merchant Osborne Chatterton from being lynched by three outlaws who are after his beautiful daughter,...

Rancher Jason McHenry struggled against Apaches, bandits, disease, drought, and hardship in Arizona for five years and finally gave up. He sells his ranch and heads for Chicago to work in the stockyards. The first leg of his journey is in a stagecoach with five other passengers: a fellow rancher heading...

A greedy mine owner, Nicholas Montgomery murders Frank Kincaid and his son, Jed, in the mountains of Arizona so he can steal their lucrative gold mine. Another of the man’s sons, John Kincaid, arrives in town and learns of the murders of his father and brother. He is sure Montgomery has committed...

Forrest Macklin, cowboy and wrangler, stumbles across a large amount of money in southwest New Mexico Territory in the hot summer of 1881, in the process getting a flesh wound in the side. The money was stolen from a bank in Tombstone, Arizona. He can’t quite bring himself to keep the ill-gotten...

Passed Midshipman Gavin MacKenzie and the USS Pawnee head for Charleston Harbor in a desperate attempt to resupply Fort Sumter in April 1861. Too late, the country plunges into civil war. Events follow quickly for the Pawnee: the destruction of the Norfolk Navy Yard, the Battle of Aquia Creek, the...