Honor at Daybreak

By Elmer Kelton

Book Overview

From one of the West's greatest living??storytellers, winner of numerous awards, including the Spur,??the Golden Saddleman, and the Western Heritage??Award, here is Elmer Kelton's magnificent new novel??of the wildcat West Texas oil boom of the 1920s.??It used to be that the worst crime in Caprock was??moonshining or lying about your Saturday night date??on Sunday morning--until someone struck oil. Now??the scent of the stuff has brought every dreamer,??drifter, and two-bit swindler to town. Among them??is the frontier mobster Big Boy Daugherty, who??warns any who'd stand in his way: Get Out or??Die. One man will do neither. Sheriff??Dave Buckalew is a man too proud to give up and??too stubborn to give in. He liked his town the way??it was--before the bootleggers, brothels, and??fortune-seeking roustabouts--and so did a lot of other??hardworking decent folk. Together they'll fight??to win back their town--and their future. This is??the story of their heroic stand.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385248938
• ISBN13: 9780385248938
• Release Date: February 1991
• Publisher: Doubleday
• Length: 390 Pages
• Weight: 1.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.6" x 6.5" x 1.4"

Customer Reviews

The Story of Oil in Texas

To be honest with you, this is not one of my favorite Elmer Kelton books. Perhaps it is because it is "modern" set in the 1920's. Perhaps it is the subject--oil. I don't rightly know. There are some fine characters in this book, none more memorable than Sheriff Dave Buckalew, the man too proud to give in, and too stubborn to give up. What we have here in this book is in effect the same thing which happened to any town when there is in influx of people, bad people--bootleggers, gamblers, fortune hunters, and the unseemly establishments which go with them. The end of track towns, the end of trail towns, the gold and silver camps, all faced the same disastrous change as did Caprock. How the Sheriff gets the town together to fight this onslaught is what this book is about, and how they fight back to regain their town and assure it has a future. The writing is on par with any other Elmer Kelton book, his history is impeccable as always, but for some reason the story and I just did not connect, as it usually does with his books. It's not a bad book, just a readable one.