Western

After reading North to the Rails, I now understand perfectly why Louis L’Amour is so beloved. His portrait of life in the West has such richness, filled with casual, familiar detail about the land---its rivers, stands of timber and scrub, how the cycles of seasons and weather change it. The people populating that land are just as vivid: hard and rough, loyal or treacherous, quick to kindness or cruelty, standing on principles of courage and determination. And the story that takes place in this West has a kind of grandeur. L’Amour doesn’t ignore the dangers, but his hero, Tom Chantry, meets them with spirit, and the obstacles Chantry encounters allow the reader to share his growing understanding of what a frontier, with all its attendant lawlessness, requires of a settler. ( )

In this final book of the Chantry series Tom, the son of Borden Chantry, is heading west in search of cattle to ship back east. Still green and unused to the ways of the frontier, he's an easy target for cattle rustlers or thieves...or is he?

I really liked this story and the characters contained within. It's a better than average L'Amour. ( )

North to the Rails is a good story. It keeps its feeling from the beginning to the end. It is easy to imagine the characters and the scenery. The ending was unexpected but good. There is some gore but not enough to be turned away from wanting to complete the book. Four and one half star recommendation. ( )

A young man returns west to buy cattle and gets drawn into the Wild West lifestyle he dimly remembered from his childhood, when he was living on a ranch in what is now eastern Colorado. The men who killed his father seem to have some interest in him, maybe, but so do several strangers, and he must quickly abandon his original peaceful, gun-less stance and be the gunfighter his father once was. He is remarkably good at gunfighting and hand combat for a man who supposedly has had little use for violence out East for most of his life, but maybe fighting is in his blood? Still, this was a pretty decent story. ( )