The Bad Lands: A Novel [Paperback]

 

Its 1883 in Johnson County, in the old Dakota Territorya rugged, wide-open landscape of rolling, red earth, prairie, and cattle as far as the eye can see. But the land is closing, the Beef Bonanza is ending, and the free-range cattlemen are stuck watching a way of life disappear in a blaze of drought and gunfire.

An action-packed western from one of the masters of the genre, Oakley HallsThe Bad Landsblends roundups and rustlers, whorehouses and land grabs, shoot-outs and the threat of hangings in a tale of the war between the cowboys and the cattle barons. But more than this, it is an elegy to the wild beauty of the badlands before the ranchers moved in, chased off the free-rangers, the trappers, and the tribes, and fenced it all in.

 

Oakley Hall's masterpiece offers readers a new way of looking at what life was like in the American West, its compromises and dangers, heroism and corruption, violence and beauty. You'll never forget it.

Oakley Hall(1920–2008) was a great novelist of the American West and beloved writing teacher of Michael Chabon and Richard Ford, among many others. He is the author of numerous books, includingWarlock,The Coming of the Kid,Apaches, andSeparations.

List of Illustrations
Abbreviations
Preface
 
1. Classical Archaeology: The “Handmaid of History”?
The Rediscovery of the Past
The Opening Up of Greece
Philological Archaeology
The Birth of Prehistory
Theory Wars
 
2. Delphic Vapours
The Triumph of Science?
The Delphic Oracle
The Geology of the Site
Inspired Mantic or Fraudulent Puppet?
Conclusion
Documents for Chapter 2
 
3. The Persian Destruction of Eretria
A Tale of Twl7