The Old Spanish Trail: The Trail Drive, Book 11 (Trail Drive Series) - Softcover

An extraordinary saga of the trail-blazing cowboys who made their fortune driving cattle from Texas to the great frontier. Hard-riding Texans were braving mountains, desert and Indian war-- for the promise of a golden land called California... Over one million copies of Ralph Compton's Trail Drive novels in print! Missouri was closed to Texas cattle. Santa Fe was closed by murder. Now, they had one choice: cross desert mountains and hostile Indian land-- to a place called California... The only riches Texans had left after the Civil War were five million maverick longhorns and the brains, brawn, and boldness to drive them north to where the money was. Now, Ralph, Compton brings this violent and magnificent time to life in an extraordinary epic series based on the history-blazing trail drives. For the ranchers riding with Rand Hayes, things had gone from bad to worse. The Santa Fe man who'd contracted five thousand head of cattle was dead-- murdered by renegades. Now the Texans had a herd of longhorns and only one choice: cross two mountain ranges and the Mojave Desert to the gold-fevered market at Los Angeles. A trail blazed by ancient Spaniards, this was a route that would lead through a brutal, wondrous land, where a hostile Ute nation was only one danger the cattle drive faced, and California was a shooting war away...

Ralph Compton stood six-foot-eight without his boots. His first novel in the Trail Drive series, The Goodnight Trail, was a finalist for the Western Writers of America Medicine Pipe Bearer Award for best debut novel. He was also the author of the Sundown Rider series and the Border Empire series. A native of St. Clair County, Alabama, Compton worked as a musician, a radio announcer, a songwriter, and a newspaper columnist before turning to writing westerns. He died in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1998.