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Top Hand Sodbuster: A Western Novel

by Bob Hammer

283 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #06-2251; ISBN 1-4251-0493-2; US$20.23, C$23.26, EUR16.62, £11.63

After several bad crop years while homesteading in Dakota, Buck Farley is employed by a rancher. The work involves cattle rustling, whiskey bootlegging, murder, a lynch mob and a pretty girl.

About the Book

The Twenties come in with a roar for Buck Farley. He has cowboyed on cattle drives for ten years before he decides to try homesteading in Dakota.

After bad crop years, he is ready to saddle up and ride back to Texas when a rancher offers him employment.

The work involves him in cattle rustling, whiskey bootlegging, murder, a lynch mob, and a pretty girl, all during a tumultuous Dakota winter.

About the Author

The author lived in Wildrose, North Dakota until he was ten years old. The family moved to Minot when he was in the fifth grade.

After graduation from high school in 1940, he joined the army and served in the 90th Infantry Division for a year before going into the Army Air Corps and flying missions over Germany in a B-24. On the 40th mission the plane was shot down and crash landed in Yugoslavia. A week later they crash landed half a mile inside the Swiss border after a raid on Augsburg.

He went to college in Minot after working with cattle and farming for a few years. He taught school in Savage and Sidney, Montana for 27 years. After retirement, he took up lock-smithing and writing:

• Rhymes of the Times — (25 years of student poetry - Sidney)
  
• Stet — (an autobiography and various writings)
  
• Mark Twain's Huck Finn and Tom Saywer Among the Indians (Twain wrote nine chapters and left the boys among the Indians. The author of Top Hand Sodbuster wrote eleven chapters to get them home again.)
  

Top Hand Sodbuster was written on a silent challenge from his daughter, Gail, who gave him the book How to Write Western Novels.

The setting of Top Hand Sodbuster is somewhere between Crosby and Minot. It is fiction in every respect based on some of the author's recollections of life as it was in those days.

Names of places and people should not be affiliated with any location or person, living or dead.

Excerpts