Revisionist Western

When widowed mule breeder Cy Bellman reads in the newspaper that colossal ancient bones have been discovered in the salty Kentucky mud, he sets out from his small Pennsylvania farm to see for himself if the rumors are true: that the giant monsters are still alive and roam the uncharted wilderness beyond the Mississippi River. Promising to write and to return in two years, he leaves behind his daughter, Bess, to the tender mercies of his taciturn sister and heads west.

The Struggle for Liberty gives us vintage Ralph Raico in his roles of lecturer and professor. In these lectures he weaves together the daily life of the past, competing intellectual traditions, the history of the modern state, and the international background to create a broad and compelling narrative. He pulls no intellectual punches, presenting a complex story in such a way that his mastery of learned disputes from a hundred, or from five hundred, years ago reaches us as living, breathing history. Ralph Raico, a student of Ludwig von Mises, was a historical revisionist in the best sense ...

Spanning the years of the first great settlement of the west, The Removes tells the intertwining stories of 15-year-old Anne Cummins, frontierswoman Libbie Custer, and Libbie’s husband, the Civil War hero George Armstrong Custer. When Anne survives a surprise attack on her family’s homestead, she is thrust into a difficult life she never anticipated - living among the Cheyenne as both a captive and, eventually, a member of the tribe. Libbie, too, is thrown into a brutal, unexpected life when she marries Custer.

The truth of it is that Daniel Boone, captured by the Shawnee, now the adopted son of a chief he respects and husband to a Shawnee wife, does not want to come back to his settler life. But when he learns the Shawnee and the English plan to attack the fort he founded, where his white wife and children remain, he escapes in order to warn them. No arms open to greet him, however: Rebecca has taken all of their children save one - Jemima - back east. The other settlers view him with suspicion, and some of them want him hanged as a traitor.