Elkhorn Tavern

Description

"Elkhorn Tavern has the beauty of Shane and the elegiac dignity of Red River without the false glamour or sentimentality of those classic Western films... Mr. Jones is at home among the ridges and hardwoods of a frontier valley... He holds us still and compels us to notice what we live in."-The New York Times Book Review From Douglas C. Jones, an author the Los Angeles Times called "a superb storyteller and authentic chronicler of the American West," comes a classic Civil War novel, long out of print but considered one of the great titles of the genre. With her husband gone east to fight for the Confederate Army, Ora Hasford is left alone to tend to her Arkansas farm and protect her two teenage children, Calpurnia and Roman. But only a short distance away, in the shadow of Pea Ridge, a storm is gathering. In a clash to decide control over the western front, two opposing armies prepare for a brutal, inevitable battle. Beset by soldiers, bushwhackers, and jayhawkers, the Hasfords' home stands unprotected in what will soon be one of the worst battlegrounds in the West.

Douglas C. Joneswas a three-time winner of the Western Writers of America's Golden Spur Award, as well as the recipient of their Owen Wister Award of Lifetime Achievement. A native of Arkansas, Jones died in 1998.

"Elkhorn Tavern is undoubtedly Douglas Jones's finest novel. The characters are unforgettable, the atmosphere wonderfully detailed, the action and suspense skillfully maintained."-Dee Brown, author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee "Douglas C. Jones writes what might be called historical novels, but they are much more than that. They are stirring word pictures of the way things really were in this country not so long ago... Elkhorn Tavern is even better than the books that preceded it."-Associated Press "Jones is a meticulous craftsman whose dialects, dialogues, settings and sayings seem so right and natural that one has the satisfying feeling of having read a novel without one false note."-San Francisco Sunday Examiner "A fine, uncompromising, unusually angled piece of Civil War fiction-from a master of gritty historical[s]."-Kirkus Reviews