In its Texastown district, recently hired marshal, James Butler Hickok, the West’s most famous gunman, struggles to control streets teeming with thousands of hostile cowboys. A tiny exotic dot of roaring humanity on the vast vacancy of the wilderness prairie, Abilene is a place in which good and evil are so evenly matched that no one knows which will triumph. Winner of the 2013 Kansas Notable Book Award from the Center for the Book/State Library of Kansasīased on actual events, Wide Open is a novel of family and coming of age set in 1871 Abilene, Kansas, the first of the great prairie cowtowns. With Why Cows Need Cowboys, we invite you to journey westward with us, and we hope you enjoy the ride.Peacemaker Award for Best Western First Novel The contributors to this anthology, WWA members all, include bestselling authors and winners of numerous prestigious literary awards. Now in our sixty-eighth year, our more than seven hundred members write fiction and nonfiction, songs, poetry, short stories, plays for stage and screen, and more. Did you know that in 1821, a Plains Indian girl trekked 1,400 miles to visit Washington, DC? Or that two brave children, eight and ten years old, took part in the Texas Revolution? Tales in this anthology range wide in time, topic, and mood, yet all celebrate a spirit that is uniquely Western.įounded in 1953, Western Writers of America is the nation’s oldest and most distinguished organization of professionals writing about the early frontier and the American West, its past and present. Here you’ll meet extraordinary characters, from a young buffalo hunter of prehistoric times to riders for the Pony Express, the first African American female stagecoach driver, and the Navajo code talkers of World War II. In this collection of true tales of the West, we leave textbook history in the rearview mirror and take you on a tour of twenty seldom-told dramas, the kind you might stumble across only if you leave the main road to wander the detours and byways of the American story. Welcome to Western Writers of America’s first anthology for young readers.

**2022 Will Rogers Medallion Award Gold Winner for Western Non-Fiction - Young Readers**

Wide Open by Larry Bjornson