About The Book

Description

William Dale Jennings novel is a fast- moving and highly evolving tale of a middle-aged rancher (Will Anderson) who's got to drive his 800 head of cattle to market or risk losing his spread. Trouble is, his ne'er-do-well sons are dead, and there is not an able-bodied hand within a hundred miles because every one of them has skedaddled to the Dakota gold fields. So Anderson is forced to recruit a gang of schoolboys to get his herd to market; the long drive that results is full of adventure, mayhem and heartbreak. Rustlers and Indians are an ever-present danger. At the end, every boy on Will Anderson's cattle drive has become a man. A cross between "Red River" and "Lord of the Flies," "The Cowboys" was made into a big-budget John Wayne Western in the early seventies, but the book is more compelling than the film. Jennings wrote it in a frenetic burst of creative energy when he was flat broke; six weeks after he completed it, the manuscript had been sold to Warner Bros. for six figures, to Ballantine as a paperback and to Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux for hardcover publication.