West Routt Library District

"Necktie Party" they called it-a quick and easy form of frontier justice. The hard-eyed cattleman named Price, leader of the lynch party, looked up at the hanging tree and knew it would serve his murderous purpose. He jerked the lasso tight around the boy's neck. The two other riders, younger even than the one they were about to hang, looked sick. "Get set to kick his horse out from under him," Price ordered. Then Laramie stepped out of the willows,...

A ranching family in Montana must fight off others who are trying to take over their land. Follows the Dutton family, led by John Dutton, who controls the largest contiguous ranch in the United States, under constant attack by those it borders--land developers, an Indian reservation, and America's first National Park. It is an intense study of a violent world far from media scrutiny--where land grabs make developers billions, and politicians are...

The author draws on her travels and homestead life in the Colorado Rockies in an essay collection on her ties to nature that explores the symbiotic relationship between humans and the earth. "'How do we become who we are in the world? We ask the world to teach us,' Pam Houston writes. On her 120-acre homestead high in the Colorado Rockies, this beloved writer learns what it means to care for a piece of land and the creatures on it. Elk calves...

"Those old cows knew trouble was coming before we did." So begins the story of Lily Casey Smith, in Jeannette Walls's magnificent, true-life novel based on her no-nonsense, resourceful, hard working, and spectacularly compelling grandmother. By age six, Lily was helping her father break horses. At fifteen, she left home to teach in a frontier town -- riding five hundred miles on her pony, all alone, to get to her job. She learned to drive a car ("I...

The first installment in Miller's new trilogy features the present-day descendants of the heroes from her earlier McKettrick novels. Cheyenne Bridges makes a reluctant return to her hometown of Indian Rock, Ariz., her job hinging on whether she can persuade her high school flame Jesse McKettrick to sell some of his land for her employer's condo development deal. Jesse, a confirmed bachelor and committed poker player, refuses outright to sell his landat...

The only hope that Eileen Mulkerin and her sons have of saving their ranch lies in finding a hidden cache of gold whose location was known only to her dead husband.

When Dink, Josh, and Ruth Rose visit a dude ranch in Montana, they find themselves with another mystery to solve, this one involving the theft of money from the ranch's safe and of a large gold nugget that Josh had found.