Brules » (Reprint)

Not so many years ago, rumor had it that the grizzled mountain man living by himself in a cabin on Lone Cone Peak in southwestern Colorado was an outlaw to stay clear of. A true survivor of the woolliest days of America's great move westward, he was a man with chilling memories and few regrets, a legend folks whispered about for years - a hard, hurting cowboy. His name was Brules. Cat Brules began life as a wild, full-of-the-devil young plainsman. He rode carefree and hell-bent on his favorite horse across Kansas, where he met a girl and fell in love. He drove a mule team deep into buffalo country with a starry-eyed scheme to strike it rich, and he had the deadly misfortune to lose his best friend to the Comanches. And from that point on Brules became a man in search of justice and his own soul...a man whose life would embrace the whole short, passionate history of the Old West. Bringing to life this grand, sweeping novel is a feat of sheer storytelling genius. The tale unfolds as Brules tells it to a young man who dared to approach the gritty outlaw's lonely cabin and was rewarded with the story of Cat Brules's life...of his one brief, passionate love with Wild Rose, a Shoshone woman; of his unshakable friendship with a silver-spurred Mexican named Pedro; and of his one-man war against those who robbed him of his girl, his friend, and his heart. Written by Harry Combs, the charismatic eighty-year-old aviator and outdoorsman, Brules began as a story Combs told to his grandchildren and grew into this sprawling, impeccably researched historical novel about freedom and our nation's past. It is a work so grand in scope and scale, so filled with brutality and violence, heroism and tenderness, it will take your breath away. Brules is written in fire and blood; it is tougher than Lonesome Dove, richer than Jack London, and better than any of them.

Publishers Weekly

In 1916, civil engineering student Steven Cartwright plays hooky from his father's fall cattle drive to visit Cat Brules, a mysterious Colorado mountain man rumored to be a thief and a murderer. The friendship between the boy and this relic of the rapidly disappearing frontier provides a frame for this fluid first novel, as Brules tells Steven the story of his life over a series of nights around the campfire. After a drive down the Chisholm Trail in 1867, Brules killed his trail boss in a fight over a Hays City, Kans., prostitute named Michelle. Fleeing town, the pair were captured by Comanches; Brules escaped, but Michelle was tortured and killed, setting her lover on a one-man vendetta against the Indians. Brules gradually overcomes his hatred, eventually marrying a Native American. The author, an aviation pioneer who wrote a nonfiction study of the Wright Brothers, Kill Devil Hill , clearly knows and loves the land and history of the American West. References to numerous actual people and events (Butch Cassidy, General Crook, the Fetterman massacre) add verisimilitude to his story. Although overly long and tending to drag in spots, this expansive novel will remind some readers of Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove . ( July )