Outlaws of the Brasada: A Western Duo

A Civil War veteran and widower struggles to keep his children alive in a pair of classic Western tales.

Things looked dark for Emery Bandine when he returned to Spanish Crossing from fighting in the Civil War. Conditions in Texas were so harsh that he could barely feed his family. He started to gather a stake by rounding up unbranded cattle in the brush country, but he couldn’t afford to pay for medical care for his young wife, and she died while bearing her third child. Bandine is left with two children and swears that no matter what he has to do, he won’t let them grow up to face the same poverty. But how can he fight the Union occupation forces and at the same time protect his children?

Outlaws of the Brasada is accompanied by one of Savage’s finest short stories, “Gunstorm Ghost,” a chilling tale of a gunfighter with his back against the wall. Due to his preference for historical accuracy, Savage often ran into problems with book editors in the 1950s who were concerned about marriages between his protagonists and women of different races—a commonplace on the real frontier but not in much Western fiction of that decade. This edition of Outlaws of the Brasada fully restores Savage’s original text.