Bitter Grass

Synopsis

The Civil War changed many things for many men, and Jonathan Trask was no exception. Returning home after two painful years in a Yankee hospital and prison camp, he found his mother dead, his father a hopeless drunk, their once-prosperous ranch a shambles, and the girl he loved married to his brother! A lesser man might have given up in despair, but these setbacks merely tempered the steel in Jonathan's character. He suppressed his personal problems by devoting his full energies to rebuilding the ranch. Within a few years his success was acknowledged throughout Texas and his name was spoken with respect and fear. But Jonathan's empire had a fatal flaw and as his wealth and power grew, so did the seeds of self-destruction. BITTER GRASS is an exciting western of a dynamic man destroying himself through the misuse of power. Note from T. V. Olsen Author Frontier historians, professional and amateur, will recognize BITTER GRASS as being in large part a highly fictionalized account of the career of Isom Prentice "Print" Olive, a real-life pioneer cattleman of Texas and Nebraska. With a few exceptionsmost notably Alex McKennathe key characters are drawn from life to one degree or another, as is much of the narrative. However, because my characterization of actual personalities is imaginary, because many of the events are either fictitious or based only slightly on fact, and because the chronological sprawl of a single career has been here compressed into a ten-year period, I have assigned fictional names to most places and all but a handful of historical persons mentioned (i.e., McCoy, Hickok, Shanghai Pierce). While the vigorous and violent public (but not private) life of the real "Print" Olive is paralleled very closely by that of the fictional Jonathan "Buck" Trask, no aspect of this book should be regarded as the author's opinion of "how it might have been." BITTER GRASS is a novel, not a speculative work. Both fact and speculationand two diametrically opposed viewpoints on the character of "Print" Olive are abundantly presented in Harry E. Chrisman's THE LADDER OF RIVERS and Man Sandoz' THE CATTLEMEN, to which I refer the curious reader.

Copyright:

1967

Book Details

Book Quality:

Excellent

Book Size:

184 Pages

Publisher:

N/A

Date of Addition:

08/20/04

Copyrighted By:

Theodore V. Olsen

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

Westerns, Literature and Fiction

Submitted By:

James (Jim) Caldwell

Proofread By:

book lover

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.