Michael Zimmer

Wil Chama was interviewed in 1938 as a contributor to the American Legends Collection, a part of the Federal Writers' Project. Speaking into an Edison Dictaphone he narrated the events of his life. His personal narrative included his involvement as a strike breaker in what became known as the Gunnison Affair. It was as a result of this shameful episode that he gained his reputation as a gunman and sought to bury himself as a driver of a salt wagon...

Taken from surviving transcripts from the American Legends Collection (ALC) created in 1936 as part of the Federal Writers Project of the WPA, Zimmer weaves the story of J.T. Latham, incarcerated in Yuma Territory Penitentiary, and Sheriff Del Buchman who frees him in exchange for Latham being his guide through the Sonora Desert to make a prisoner exchange with some seriously dangerous banditos.

He is known as Johnny Montana. It is the name given to him by his fellow miners in the Redhawk mining district. Those working have been able to accumulate sizable caches of gold dust. The problem for the miners is how to get their gold out of the district. Brett Cutter and his gang of Cut-throats watch the roads and byways for miners trying to leave. Vacating miners are attacked and usually left dead after having been stripped of their gold. It is...

An intriguing tale of métis buffalo hunts, a long-lost daughter, and a macabre secret. Big John McTavish has been hunting and trading among the métis buffalo hunters of the Red River Valley for more than thirty years. He's a trusted member of the half-breed nation, and a leader of the mixed-bloods' twice-yearly buffalo hunts. However, when he returns to the settlements in the fall of 1832 with a mountain man he's rescued from a Chippewa war party,...

Buffalo trace: Hallie Mae Edson and her brother, Tom, join the newly formed Indiana Territorial Rangers. When another Ranger disappears, Hallie comes face to face with danger in a way she has never faced before. She not only has to save the Ranger, but herself, with skills, will, and courage she didn't know she had. Two old Comanches: Imprisoned in a dark, damp and inhospitable Army post in St. Augustine, Florida, an aging Comanche warrior and his...

Tom Slade is riding shotgun for a Colorado and Prescott Stagecoach Company delivery of mine payrolls in Arizona when the stage is robbed. With no time to get help, Slade sets off in pursuit on a worn-out harness mule. But he hadn't counted on a woman showing up in the desert with her own reason for tracking down the outlaws, or her mysterious friend, Charlie Red.

Half-frozen and nearly dead, Gil Ryan rode into the little mountain town of Larkspur just ahead of a raging late-winter blizzard. He'd lost everything he owned except for his mount and the clothes on his back when his pack horse fell through the ice on the Big Sandy River. Racked with fever, early-stage pneumonia, and a barely healed gunshot wound, all he wanted was a little medicine and a warm place to wait out the storm. But Gil had no way of knowing...

"When a decades-old feud between a wealthy plantation owner named Watson and a mixed-blood Chickasaw family explodes in violence, Elijah Two-Buck finds himself homeless and on the run. Locating his brother, the infamous Kid Jace, and his gang of cattle rustlers, Lige reluctantly joins the band of thieves. But when a Watson-led raid on the Two-Buck family farm results in the loss of innocent lives and the law refuses to intervene, the brothers realize...

"Nineteen-year-old Gage Pardell didn't intend to kill Henry Kalb when he rode into Shelburn, Texas, to confront the son of the county's richest man. He just wanted justice for what Kalb had done to his sister. But now Henry is dead, and Gage is on the run from a gang of vicious bounty hunters hired by Henry's father. With nowhere else to go, Gage heads west toward the far-flung buffalo ranges of West Texas. There, he learns what it means to stand...