Western Heritage Award - Western Novels

2011

Gabrielle Burton. Impatient With Desire

 

2010

Dusty Richards. The Sundown Chaser

 

2009

Mary Clearman Blew. Jackalope Dreams

 

2008

Rilla Askew . Harpsong

Harlan Singer, a harmonica-playing troubadour, shows up in the Thompson family's yard one morning. He steals their hearts with his music, and their daughter with his charm. Soon he and his fourteen-year-old bride, Sharon, are on the road, two more hobos of the Great Depression, hitchhiking and hopping freights across the Great Plains in search of an old man and the settlement of Harlan's long-standing debt.

2007

Alan Geoffrion. Broken Trail

A man and his estranged nephew become the guardians of five abused and abondoned Chinese girls. Their rivals intend to kidnap the girls while the two are delivering a herd of horses.

2006

Rosemary Agonito & Joseph Agonito. Buffalo Calf Road Woman, The Story of a Warrior of the Little Bighorn

 

2005

Randy Lee Eickhoff. And Not to Yield

2004

Johnny D. Boggs. Spark on the Prairie

Based on actual events, this novel looks at the 1871 murder trial of two Kiowa chiefs, Santana and Big Tree, in Texas. Virginia attorney Thomas Bell and Texas rancher Joe Woolfolk are appointed as counsel for the chiefs, but everyone expects them to plead their clients guilty--not defend them.

2003

Frederick J. Chiaventone. Moon of Bitter Cold

By the summer of 1866, America was a changed nation. The Civil War has ended, and the West was calling as a place where the fresh wounds of a nation divided could heal. Many set out to heed that call and explore the land that the terrible war had not touched. Amid the beauty of the region, they found its native inhabitants-and a bloody collision of two cultures.

2002

Loren D. Estleman. The Master Executioner

Ordinary people do not understand Oscar Stone. Everything he does, he does impeccably. He is a profound student of his art, completely versed in its traditions over the centuries. He is a student of ropes and their properties, a master of the latest scientific knowledge about the human neck, a careful calculator of weights and drops, and an exacting observer of results. For more than a quarter of a century he has worked to create a reputation as a man peerless in his craft: the master executioner. Yet he is utterly alone: His devotion to his work costs him his marriage. Suddenly, one day, a piece of his past catches him unawares, and Oscar comes to a moment of devastating truth and for the first time knows himself.

2001

Stephen Harrigan. The Gates of the Alamo

This full-scale novel about the siege and fall of the Alamo weaves in a love story between an American naturalist and a widow innkeeper who, along with her 16-year-old son, get swept up in the harrowing events of the heroic battle.

2000

Dan O'Brien. The Contract Surgeon

Set in the sprawling Great Plains during the most tragic period in its history, this tale of bravery, justice, and love weaves a tapestry of time and events into the account of a single day--the last in the life of Crazy Horse--to reveal the secrets surrounding America's past.

1999

Loren D. Estleman. Journey of the Dead

This is a novel of American history and its journey from wild frontier into the twentieth century. Two witnesses to this turbulent evolution tell their stories. One is an ancient Spanish alchemist searching for the philosopher's stone from his hut in the New Mexico desert. The other is the fabled Pat Garrett, the man who killed his poker buddy, Billy the Kid.

1998

Rilla Askew. The Mercy Seat

A girl's account of the violent life on the frontier. Mattie is 11 when her family moves from Kentucky to 1880s Oklahoma. After her mother dies, an uncle tries to get her father to abandon his honest job of shoeing horses for a life of crime, dealing in guns. By the author of Strange Business.

1997

Kate Lehrer. Out of Eden

1996

Jane Kirkpatrick. A Sweetness to the Soul

This Western Heritage Award winner recounts the thrilling story of young pioneer Jane Herbert. It offers heart-warming insights into romance, pain, love, forgiveness and the miracle of God's healing power.

1995

Max Evans. Bluefeather Fellini in the Sacred Realm

1994

Barbara Kingsolver. Pigs in Heaven

When a six-year-old adopted child named Turtle is the sole witness to a freakaccident, she and her mother find that fame is their downfall.

1993

Cormac McCarthy. All the Pretty Horses

Cut off from the life of ranching he has come to love by his grandfather's death, John Grady Cole flees to Mexico, where he and his two companions embark on a rugged and cruelly idyllic adventure.

1992

Judith Freeman. Set for Life

"Dying from heart disease, retired Idaho carpenter Phil Doucet has resigned himself to the inevitable. When Phil's beloved 16-year-old grandson Luke is declared brain dead following a car wreck, Phil becomes the transplant recipient of the boy's heart. Healthy again and ``set for life,'' as one doctor puts it, Phil finds himself fighting spiritual emptiness. Ultimately, another 16-year-old, Louise, sexually experienced, homeless, and fleeing her white supremacist upbringing, provides Phil with the incentive to accept a fuller life." - Library Journal

1991 Larry McMurtry. Buffalo Girls

McMurtry follows Calamity Jane and some of the Wild West's aging legends as they join Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show.

1990

Chad Oliver. Broken Eagle

1989

Glendon Swarthout. The Homesman

After venturing west of the Missouri to stake claims in uncharted territory, a number of settlers find the earth fallow and the desolate, lonely winters unbearable. When four of the wives go mad, the local minister entrusts a prim, strong-willed young schoolmarm, Mary Bee Cuddy, to transport them back to Iowa by covered wagon. With her, virtually against his will, is Briggs, a dishonest, foul-mouthed land-grabber (he steals other peoples' claims) whom Mary Bee saved from a lynching in exchange for his help.

1988

Elmer Kelton. The Man Who Rode Midnight

"This warmly human story about a generation gap that closes is set in west Texas of the 1980s where the old and new ways are in serious conflict." - Library Journal

1987

Greg Matthews. Heart of the Country

"A half-white child is born to a dying Indian woman alone on the Kansas prairie in 1855. Adopted by a Saint Louis doctor, he grows up intelligent, willful, and perhaps cursed. He runs away at 16 and careens through several jobs and much money until trapped as a nursemaid to another precocious brat in a small Kansas town. Hunchbacked, distant, and of alien stock, Joe Cobden lives an unheroic life, but the small insanities he takes part in or meets in that small town are the meat of this tremendous novel." - Library Journal

1986

A. B. Guthrie Jr. Playing Catch-Up

1985

Ivan Doig. English Creek

In the days of arriving summer, on a rangeland green across northern Montana, Jick McCaskill comes of age late in the Depression. Jick is 14, able now to claim a man's place in the life of family, town and ranch.

1984

Frank Calkins. The Long Riders' Winter

1983

No award given

1982

No award given

1981

No award given

1980

Ruth Beebe Hill. Hanta Yo

1979

Elmer Kelton. The Good Old Boys

Hewey Calloway has a problem. In his west Texas home of 1906, the land and way of life he loves are changing too quickly. As Hewey struggles against the relentless stream of "progress," he comes to realize that the simple life of his childhood is vanishing - and that every choice he makes requires a sacrifice.

1978

Dorothy M. Johnson. Buffalo Woman

A fictionalized account, as seen through the eyes of a woman known as Whirlwind, of life with the Oglala Sioux from 1820 through the aftermath of the victory at the Little Bighorn in 1877.

1977

No Award Given

1976

No award given

1975

James Michener. Centennial

A stunning panorama of the West, CENTENNIAL is an enthralling celebration of our country, brimming with the glory and the greatness of the American past that only bestselling author James Michener could bring to stunning life. From the Native Americans, the migrating white men and women, the cowboys, and the foreigners, it is 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.

1974

Elmer Kelton. The Time It Never Rained

The earth lay dying. Crops dried up, and fertile soil dissolved into clouds of yellow. Ranchers did everything within their power, and federal forces were called in fruitlessly. Only Charlie Flagg, old-time Texas cattleman, saw it as a fight worth continuing--and refused to give up his battle against Nature.

1973

Wiill Henry. Chiricahua

1972

Frank Waters. Pike's Peak

1971

A. B. Guthrie Jr. Arfive

1970

Benjamin Capps. The White Man's Road

1969

Fred Grove. The Buffalo Runners

A novel on buffalo runners of the 1870s Western plains. The hero is Keith Hayden, a drifter who joins a band of hunters engaged in the ugly and dangerous, but very profitable business of slaughtering the animals. By the author of Comanche Captives.

1968

Robert Flynn. North to Yesterday

1967

Bill Gulick. They Came to a Valley

1966

Vardis Fisher. Mountain Man

Tailored after the actual "Crow Killer" John Johnson, Sam Minard is a mountain man who seeks the freedom that the Rocky Mountains offers trappers. After his beloved Indian wife is murdered, Sam Minard becomes obsessed with vengeance, and his fortunes become intertwined with those of Kate Bowden, a widow who faces madness. This remarkable frontier fiction captures that brief season when the romantic myth of the far West became a fact.

1965

Thomas Berger. Little Big Man

The truth is always made up of little particulars which sound ridiculous when repeated." So speaks Jack Crabb, the 111-year-old narrator of Thomas Berger's masterpiece of American fiction, Little Big Man. Berger claimed the Western as serious literature with this part-farcical, part-picaresque, part-historical account of the life and adventures of a poor orphaned boy who came to be the son of two fathers-one white, the other a Cheyenne Indian chief who gave him the name Little Big Man.

1964

Robert A. Roripaugh. Honor Thy Father

1963

Edward Abbey. Fire on the Mountain

Fire on the Mountain Grandfather John Vogelin's land is his life -- a barren stretch of New Mexican wilderness, mercifully bypassed by civilization. Then the government moves in. And suddenly the elderly, mule-stubborn rancher is confronting the combined land-grabbing greed of the County Sheriff, the Department of the Interior, the Atomic Energy Commission and the U.S. Air Force. But a tough old man is like a mountain lion: if you back hom into a conner, he'll come out fighting.

1962

James D. Horan. The Shadow Catcher