Western Stories

PART 1 Fired, bankrupt, and staring at a neon pink foreclosure notice, Samantha Woods had exactly twelve dollars to her name. She didn’t know the gnarly, shriveled seed she was about to bury in her weed-choked backyard would soon spark a ruthless corporate war and birth a two-and-a-half-million-dollar agricultural empire. Rain lashed against the floor-to-ceiling…

PART 1 A bitter cold that had no mercy at all drove Nell Carver off the road and into the ditch before she even saw the fence post. She caught herself hard with both hands in the snow, her palms burning through the thin wall of her worn gloves, and pushed upright before her knees…

PART 1 Wyoming, 1887. Samuel Whitmore had built everything he had with his hands and his word. Forty years of work, the kind that starts before sunrise and doesn’t apologize for it. He had come to Wyoming when it was still territory with a horse and a bedroll and the stubbornness of a man who…

PART 1 Some people arrive in a new town with the quiet confidence of those who know they belong. Eliza Marsh was decidedly not one of those people. She sat on the worn wooden steps of the Clearfield Hotel on a brisk Tuesday afternoon in October 1885. Beside her rested a single, scuffed leather bag….

PART 1 The Wyoming territory did not welcome strangers with open arms. It welcomed them with dust, with blinding sun, and with a wind that carried the scent of sage and ancient, dried earth. Emma Vance had crossed six hundred miles by rail and forty more by wagon to reach a man she had never…

PART 1 The sun had not yet cleared the jagged spine of the eastern ridge, but the air already tasted of copper and crushed stone. Ren stood at the edge of what used to be her corral. She looked at the ruin of it without flinching, because flinching was a luxury she could not afford,…

PART 1 The thermometer mounted on the exterior siding of the farmhouse read minus twenty-two degrees, but the true measure of the cold was inside, where the air had turned sharp and unforgiving. Elena Cross stood in the center of her living room, watching her six-year-old daughter’s breath materialize as thick, ghostly plumes of white…

PART 1 Clara Weston arrived with nothing but a single trunk, and the first thing she noticed when the wagon rolled through the gate of the Colton ranch was the smell. Not the clean, working smell of cattle and turned earth she’d been promised in a letter. What reached her instead was rot — damp…

PART 1 Sarah Boone had watched Abram Hollis eat his supper alone on that porch step for the better part of two years before she ever let herself truly see it. A tin plate balanced on his knee. A field behind him gone to seed for two seasons running, the fence posts along its edge…

PART 1 Delia Marsh had already decided not to care what they thought of her, and that was the only reason she didn’t flinch when the laughter started. She stood at the rail of the Thistle Ridge stock yard with thirty-one half-starved goats roped together in front of her, a fistful of coins still warm…