RED SKY AT MORNING
by Richard Bradford
Coming-of-age story of a teenage boy sitting out World War II with his mother in a small town in New Mexico while his father volunteers his services to the Navy.

MYSTERIES BY MARGARET COEL
Margaret Coel's western mysteries are set among the Arapahos on the Wind River Reservation.

RODZINA
by Karen Cushman
A twelve-year-old Polish American girl is boarded onto an orphan train in Chicago with fears about traveling to the West and a life of unpaid slavery.

THE DIARY OF MATTIE SPENSER
by Sandra Dallas
Nobody was more surprised than Mattie herself when Luke Spenser, considered the great catch of their small Iowa town, asked her to marry him. Less than a month later, they are wed and setting off in a covered wagon to build a home on the Colorado frontier. Mattie's only company, aside from a taciturn and slightly mysterious new husband, is her private journal, where she records the joys and frustrations not just of frontier life, but also of marriage to a handsome but distant stranger. As Mattie and Luke make a life together on the harsh and beautiful prairie, battling the fierce odds imposed by weather, illness, and lawlessness, Mattie learns some bitter truths about her husband and the woman he left behind, and finds love where she least expects it.

MYSTERIES BY TONY HILLERMAN
Tony Hillerman's western mystery novels are set in the Four Corners area of New Mexico and feature protagonists Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee of the Navajo tribal police.

THE WATER SEEKER
by Kimberly Willis Holt
Traces the hard life, filled with losses, adversity, and adventure, of Amos, son of a trapper and dowser, from 1833 when his mother dies giving birth to him until 1859, when he himself has grown up and has a son of his own.

DAYBREAKERS
by Louis L'Amour
Forced to kill a man in Tennessee, Tyrel Sackett and his brother Orrin hit the trail heading west. Arriving in Montana, Orrin takes on a job as a marshal in a frontier town, with Tye, the fastest gun alive, backing him up every step of the way. Determined to bring peace and security to the area riddled by rustlers, killers, and Indians, the two work to make the West a place where decent men and women could live in peace.

HATTIE BIG SKY
by Kirby Larson
After inheriting her uncle's homesteading claim in Montana, sixteen-year-old orphan Hattie Brooks travels from Iowa in 1917 to make a home for herself and encounters some unexpected problems related to the war being fought in Europe.

THE DEVIL'S PAINTBOX
by Victoria McKernan
In 1866, fifteen-year-old Aidan and his thirteen-year-old sister Maddy, penniless orphans, leave drought-stricken Kansas on a wagon train hoping for a better life in Seattle, but find there are still many hardships to be faced.

LONESOME DOVE
by Larry McMurtry
Set in the late nineteenth century, Lonesome Dove is the story of a cattle drive from Texas to Montana. It is a drive that represents for everybody involved not only a daring, even a foolhardy, adventure, but a part of the American Dream – the attempt to carve out of the last remaining wilderness a new life.

CENTENNIAL
by James Michener
A story of trappers, traders, homesteaders, gold seekers, ranchers, and hunters–all caught up in the dramatic events and violent conflicts that shaped the destiny of our legendary West.

BORN TO BE A COWGIRL: A SPIRITED RIDE THROUGH THE OLD WEST
by Candace Savage
Fresh air, open prairie, and a galloping horse-what more could a girl want? Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, families headed west to build ranches and start new lives in the cattle business. Their daughters were raised on the range with an independent spirit and horses in their blood. Now modern-day cowgirls can come face-to-face with the revolutionary cowgirl style of yesteryear through first-person recollections and over 40 detail-rich, engaging photographs.

SHANE
by Jack Schaefer
In the summer of 1889, a mysterious and charismatic man rides into a small Wyoming valley, where he joins homesteaders who take a stand against a bullying cattle rancher, and where he changes the lives of a young boy and his parents.

GHOST MEDICINE
by Andrew Smith
Still mourning the recent death of his mother, seventeen-year-old Troy Stotts relates the events of the previous year when he and his two closest friends try to retaliate against the sheriff's son, who has been bullying them for years.

THESE IS MY WORDS: THE DIARY OF SARAH AGNES PRINE, 1881-1901: ARIZONA TERRITORIES
by Nancy Turner
Sarah Prine's diary portrays the joys and hardships of living out west at the end of the 1800s. Beginning at age seventeen, she recounts events over twenty years, including Indian attacks, marriages, births, and deaths.