BEYOND THE GOODNIGHT TRAIL

An adventure focuses on the first cattle drive from Texas to the New Mexico Territory.

Gaston introduces readers to Pete Horse, the novel’s narrator and main character. In 1860, Pete is working with Charlie Goodnight as a scout for the Texas Rangers, participating in a Comanche-hunting expedition. Seeking revenge for a series of violent rampages across Texas, the Rangers attack and decimate a Comanche village. But Pete has had enough of the fighting and the killing. He tells Goodnight: “I’ve staved this off” as long “as I can. I just can’t do this anymore. I don’t know, if by God’s rights, whether it’s Comanches or Texans or Americans or even Mexicans are entitled to this land.” Fast-forward to 1866, and Pete receives a letter from Goodnight asking him to join a new endeavor—taking 2,500 Texas longhorns along a 600-mile cattle drive through Comanche country, from Belknap, Texas, up into the New Mexico Territory, to feed the starving Navajos. The author seamlessly blends fact (and sometimes legend) with fiction, placing Pete in the middle of historical events. The hero interacts with personages of the time, such as Goodnight. Pete’s backstory recounts the experiences of the Black Seminoles and Maroons. He was born into slavery in Florida to a Spanish and Seminole father and a Black mother. Before his father, an owner of enslaved people, returned to Spain, he freed Pete, his brother, his sisters, and his mother. Then came the great removal of Native Americans to the West, and Pete and his family walked the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma. Gaston’s cowboy tale offers a plotline more thoughtful and complex than those usually found in such fare. The rip-roaring story is helmed by a compassionate, multilayered protagonist. The narrative contains plenty of well-paced action and a widely diverse assortment of characters—including a renegade band of former members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints led by a violent zealot hell-bent on forming his own cult. Some of the most engaging episodes involve the cattle drive itself, with the author providing vivid descriptions of the difficulties and dangers of moving a large herd of ornery and rather clever longhorns. Then there is the small group of Comanche warriors that shadows the cowboys.

A captivating, frequently philosophical page-turner that delivers a visceral portrait of the Wild West.