The Beauty of the Days Gone By

A Novel

By: Jason Stone

An epic Western novel, based on historical events about a legendary cattle rancher and a family torn apart by the violent struggle between Texans and the Comanche and Kiowa Indians

1866. The young Terry brothers are playing idly in the sun-drenched prairie near their home in West Texas when a Kiowa warparty raids their ranch. Their father, former Texas Ranger R. L. Terry, returns home to find his house in flames, his wife mortally wounded, and his two boys hauled away into captivity. As his eldest boy becomes fully Indianized under the tutelage of legendary Comanche chief Quanah Parker, Terry spends years desperately searching for his sons with the help of his good friend, the trailblazing cattle rancher Charles Goodnight.

The narrative moves from those dramatic post-Reconstruction years to the 1920s, where the 90 year-old Goodnight faces the end of his life and reminisces about his days as one of the early cattlemen to blaze the Goodnight-Loving trail and the first to settle permanently in the land known as Comancheria.

Inspired by contemporary journals, testimony, and historical records, The Beauty of the Days Gone By is a cinematic, vivid, and impeccably rendered Western novel in the tradition of Lonesome Dove and Blood Meridian that weaves the tragic captivity narrative with the calamitous clash of cultures that defined the settlement of the American West.