Showing results by author "Virgil Cain" in All Categories

The Wild West would have remained too wild for even the most talented gunfighters to tame had it not been for the scouts, trappers, Indian fighters, freighters, soldiers, and settlers who preceded them. There were no towns to settle, no businesses to patronize, no rows to hoe, and no roads to travel. Everything had to be earned the hard way. For most men, it meant death and dismemberment. For others, it meant failure. Few and far between were those who found glory. Everywhere the iron horse galloped, civilization soon followed. Yet, who would have forged the trails that the iron rails ...

The Vandals and Huns were growing bolder by the hour and the Goths already dominated the whole of Illyricum. Barbarian officers led Roman armies, held positions in Roman government, protected Roman borders, facilitated Roman trade, owned Roman land, plowed Roman fields, and even prayed in Roman churches. This was not an enemy that could be met and defeated at the border. It was an enemy that already lived among them. The only way to remove such an invasive species was to eradicate it at the root, turning Romans against their heathen neighbors in such a cruel manner as could not be justified...

Wyatt Earp was a gambler and a pimp long before he wore the tin star. Big Nose Kate was the daughter of a Hungarian doctor who emigrated in good standing to the Midwest when a series of unfortunate events turned her out. Billy the Kid was an orphan with no notion of becoming one of the most prodigious killers in the history of the Wild West when circumstances beyond his control convinced him to live by the gun, and to die by it if need be. Doc Holliday was a gentleman from Georgia who was so well born as to be educated in Philadelphia when a diagnosis of tuberculosis forced him on an ...

With the West divided, it was imperative that Eastern Rome become the pillar upon which the Roman Empire could lean while it recovered its strength. That’s what made the disastrous defeat suffered by Emperor Valens at the Battle of Adrianople so devastating. The folly of Julius Valens was so wide in scope and crippling in effect that it staggered the Roman mind. No matter where the story was told, the Roman people struggled to comprehend such wholesale defeat. The Emperor was dead, the eastern armies were decimated, and the victorious barbarian horde roamed unchecked across the Balkans. ...

Born of the most prominent family in Hispania, the father of Magnus Maximus squandered his part of the family fortune before his sons came of age. While his cousins lived a life of privilege, Maximus rose through the ranks of the western armies the hard way, becoming known as the “Crusher of Rebellions” for his ability to quell uprisings of the most violent order. It was this reputation which saw Maximus sent into the hard north to tame yet another heathen rebellion. Had he been of moderate ambition, his career might have ended in Britannia, but there was nothing moderate about Magnus ...

Old Shoe thought he’d seen it all. Having settled in Arizona two decades previous, when Cochise was still taking trophies off white folks, the arrival of the steel pony was supposed to settle all that lawlessness. A silver strike in the Dragoon Mountains changed that, drawing desperate men from every walk of life to the upstart mining camp of Tombstone. That’s when an outsider with poor intentions showed up, asking for a price on land that wasn’t for sale.

Many good men are already in the ground, and some bad ones too. The gravediggers and coffin makers are sore for the work, which has some folks questioning whether Tombstone is even worth rebuilding after a devastating fire swept across the town. With blood flowing down the San Pedro, the question is no longer if the other shoe will drop, but whose body will tumble the next time the unmistakable crack of gunfire echoes down Allen Street.

Many believe that Constantine chose Christianity because it was the only religion that could offer him absolution for the innumerable crimes committed during his historic reign. He was a deeply troubled soul, an undeniably violent man, and an immensely immoral human being, but he was also more aware of his sins than most men. He knew how desperately he needed forgiveness. That is why he waited until the end of his life to be baptized, as it was the only way to ensure that his terrible record of inhumane acts was wiped clean. How then could it be that this beastly figure who was so full of ...

Though the burgeoning Christian identity of the Roman Empire was never without opposition, no one expected the Old Gods to forge a final, desperate effort to reclaim their empire some 60 years following the death of Constantine the Great. The Battle Frigidus marked the final installment of Rome’s trilogy of monumental civil wars. Those previous battles fought between Caesar and Pompey and again between Constantine and Licinius might be better remembered, but never had the stakes been higher than when east battled west in the rocky outcrops of the Julian Pass. As Rome goes, so does the ...

The cascading perils of the Late Rome era were relentless, bombarding whichever emperor was so unfortunate as to inherit the Purple during the last gasp of the Roman Empire. From the moment that Julius Valens acceded to the throne of the East until the last dynasty faltered in the West, only Theodosius adequately withstood this constant avalanche of tumult. Romans far and wide shuddered to think what would become of their troubled world if the fate of Rome was to be decided by his disappointing sons, Arcadius and Honorius. The Last Dynasty is the enthralling First installment of the epic ...

Wildflowers and Seedcorn recounts the first two years of the Civil War from the perspective of three central characters: Gus, the disaffected Virginian who forsakes his father by fleeing north to fight for the Federals; Charlie, the stubbornly ambitious son of a wealthy planter from Fort Smith who ends up riding for Quantrill, so eager to kill for the Confederacy that he becomes something quite different than a soldier; John, the son of a Kentucky farmer who follows his inept father into battle and surprises even himself when he finds his footing among Forrest’s cavalry. Across two years ...

Just as the Civil War nears a bitter, bloody conclusion, Indian affairs begin to creep back into the national consciousness. As Gus is laboring along the road to Atlanta, Charlie tries to hold his band of Rebel guerrillas together through the final months of the war, and John comes to terms with the reality that he no longer believes in his own cause, we are introduced to Billy Breakenrdige, a young muleskinner with a nose for adventure and a date with destiny along the banks of Sand Creek. To a man, each characters feels trapped in a common struggle not just to survive the war, but to ...

Arizona was on the verge of something special. The railroad came through at the same time as a silver boom in the Dragoons and a copper bonanza in the Mules. Tombstone was the fastest growing town in the whole country and statehood was finally on the tongues of Washington politicians. But nothing can sour a territory’s prospects like wanton violence, which was itself the story of Arizona’s luckless history. Every time progress dipped its toe into a desert waterhole, it found the temperature too hostile for its liking. It was just too wild, even for the west.

Left twisting in the wind when the Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869 without touching its desert soil, Arizona languished in a prolonged battle with the natives and the elements. That ended with a silver boom in the Dragoons and a copper boom in the Mules. An untold wealth had been discovered in the desolate mountains of southeastern Arizona, with no easy way to haul it out. Overnight, plans began to connect Tucson by rail to Los Angeles and El Paso. At long last, progress was coming to the mesquite.

Two years into the great war, Gus is in Pennsylvania, helping to turn back Lee’s second invasion of the North. Charlie is in Texas with the rest of Quantrill’s Raiders, carefully plotting their return to action following a disappointing winter. John is raiding alongside Forrest, running interference in middle Tennessee while Bragg struggles to hold onto Chattanooga. “Blood on a Whetstone” also returns to the rugged Southwest, where the characters first introduced in “South of the Gadsden Line” experience the passing of civil strife and the return of the “Indian Problem”. ...

“This dismal calamity is but just over, and you yourself are a witness to how the Rome that commanded the world was astonished at the alarm of the Gothic trumpet. Where were then the privileges of birth, and the distinctions of quality? Were not all ranks and degrees leveled at that time and promiscuously huddled together? Every house was then a scene of misery, and equally filled with grief and confusion. The slave and the man of quality were in the same circumstances, and everywhere the terror of death and slaughter was the same, unless we may say the fright made the greatest impression...

Gus served with conflicted pride in that uncivil war, seeing more battlefields than most and losing more of himself than he could reconcile. He was, in most ways, disillusioned before the war even began. By the time Joe Johnston surrendered at Durham Station, he could no longer tell up from down, and certainly not right from wrong. He had killed indiscriminately for four years, displaying not a scrap of compassion for those who fell by his gun so long as they wore a gray jersey. Such heinousness against his fellow man, even if in the name of a noble cause, left him feeling irredeemable, as ...

The bloodbath out at the Shoemaker Ranch has the entire county on edge just as Bob Paul finally takes office. As the body count rises, the Virginian begins to question his relationship with the Cowboys. Nor is he the only man of influence questioning their connection to Newman Clanton and his den of thieves. With less political coverage north of the border and the rurales turning up the heat south of it, the last thing the Cowboys can afford to do is go to war with the Earps.

A dreadful pall has overtaken the west. King Alaric and his violent horde of Gothic marauders roam unchecked in central Italy, yet another usurper has risen to steal control of Gaul, and a half-dozen Germanic tribes have overrun the Rhineland and spread their havoc south across the Pyrenees. A prisoner of his own capital, Honorius is a fallen ruler clinging bitterly to a diminished throne. Every citizen in the west can picture the fall of Rome, with no need even to close their eyes. The Age of Kings is the enthralling Fourth installment of the epic Roman saga The Völkerwanderung.

The Gadsden Purchase finished what the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo started. The old Spanish presidio at Tucson – known affectionately to locals as the “Old Pueblo” – was declared American territory on June 8, 1854. Few noticed. There were only 500 citizens at the time, and a scant few were white. Most Americans looked at the dusty old presidio, situated a day’s ride north of the Mexico border and surrounded on all sides by as many mountain ranges as hostile Apache war bands, and saw only a sweatbox populated by too many undesirables to make it worth their while. A more learned ...