The Beauty of the Days Gone By

"I loved the story and the way it was told . . . Such an artful narrative, like a more lyrical Lonesome Dove—dark, but also hopeful.”—Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down Inspired by real events, a vivid and sweeping Western in the grand tradition of Lonesome Dove and Blood Meridian: a saga of fathers and sons, captivity and belonging, and the violent struggle between Texans, Comanche, and Kiowa in the years after the Civil War 1866. On a sun-drenched stretch of West Texas prairie, the Terry brothers are playing near their family ranch when a Kiowa war party suddenly descends. Former Texas Ranger RL Terry returns to total devastation: his home in flames, his wife Sally mortally wounded, and his two boys carried off into captivity. With the help of his close friend, the great cattleman Charles Goodnight, Terry begins a relentless search for his missing sons. He rides across the vast Southern plains and into the heartland of the Comanche Empire, where buffalo hunters massacre the great herds that once blackened the horizon and soldiers under Colonel Ranald Mackenzie wage brutal campaigns to exterminate the tribes.