John Hard - The Hard Way Ranch: The Hard Ranch Series, #1

By George M. Goodwin

The mountains of the American West held many treasures. Precious metals such as gold and silver was taken from the land and the streams by the miners. Animals who's pelts were prized back East  was taken from the forest and the streams by the fur trappers. Some men even found the beauty and solitude of the mountains to be their greatest treasure. This is the story of a man who found his to be what so many others had passed over in their search. His was the land itself.
After being driven from his ranch in Texas by men with more money and power. He traveled north to the Bitter Root Mountains in search of hidden valleys he was told of as a child. There he would build his new ranch. None of these treasures came easy in the mountains. There were winters capable of freezing a man to death within a matter of hours, several tribes of hostile Indians who were always on the prowl for scalps. There was flooding streams, grizzly bears and as everywhere a few bad men. 
For the man named Hard though, nothing had ever been easy. Why should this be any different.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pale Horse Publications
• Release date: May 31, 2024
• ISBN: 9798227200266

George M. Goodwin

George was born in 1960 in Jefferson County Alabama. The fifth of nine children, eight boys and one girl. The family was raised poor, but not poorly raised. At home, George was taught morals, ethics and respect. Reading, writing and arithmetic at school. Love, honor and obedience to God at church. He grew up on John Wayne movies, country music and the writings of Louis L' Amour, Robert Louis Stevenson, H.G. Wells and Jules Verne.  

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Now he just happened to be in a different part of the country was all, and what a country it was.

Looking down into a beautiful green valley, laying what must be all of a thousand feet below where he stood. John Hard knew then he had to have this place and make it his own. He also knew without a doubt that claiming it may be easy, but holding on to it, that would be the hard part. Holding it to start with from the very ones who had pushed him to the place he was right now. He knew he would be in for a fight, but when had that ever stopped him from doing anything before. He would just have to do this like he had done everything else in his life, the hard way. Pa had taught him many things as he was growing up. One of them being that if a thing wasn’t worth working for or fighting for, then it probably wasn’t worth having in the first place.

His thoughts slipped back now, to just a year ago. At that time he had been quietly living on his own little ranch located about a hundred and fifty miles west of Fort Worth, Texas. Ten miles from the newly settled town of Abilene. The ranch had been started by his pa, Joseph Hard. That would have been shortly before John was born on June 10,1842. He had worked that ranch alongside his pa for as long as he had been old enough to walk. It wasn’t a very big place. In a land that seemed to go on forever, his pa had took in only about 6000 acres.

CHAPTER 2

John had often wondered why his pa had taken so little of the land when he could have claimed tens of thousands of acres at the time he had gotten there.

Even then, part of what he had claimed was barren sand and rock. Making it useless to anybody with plans to raise cattle. Still, it had been enough for them. Both for the amount of stock his pa could afford to buy and for the amount of work just the two of them could handle. They’d managed to get through a lot of tough times over the years.

That included the death of his ma when John was still just a youngster of nine. They’d been hit hard by drought, two summers that John could remember. Held off Indian attacks on more than one occasion and saw the lowest beef prices ever in those same years. Still, they had survived it all. Then, in August of 1859 his pa had been killed when he was thrown from a horse spooked by a rattler. That was two years ago now. John was just months over seventeen at that time, but he stepped up and took the reins of the ranch when a lot of boys his age would have saw it as a reason to drift. He had ideas of keeping it going though. The problem was, ideas was about all he did have. He hired a couple of boys from Abilene to help him, with the understanding that they would be fed and have a place to bed down, but they’d not be paid until a drive was made.

The town of Abilene had started up in 1857, about ten miles east of their ranch.

CHAPTER 3

By the time his pa died, it had grown into a fair sized town. John made a good show of it for a while. Even making a little profit on the first sale he’d made after his pa was gone. In that same time though, two very large ranches had moved in around him. These ranches had been started with something John didn’t have. Money, lots of it and money was power. More money and land meant more cattle and riders. Riders that spent their paydays in the saloons and the stores of Abilene every month.

Ranch owners that bought supplies for those men and had horses shod by the town blacksmith.

These owners brought their families into town on occasion to eat at the restaurant or buy from the stores. Some of them even kicked in a good amount of money for a church and school to be built.

Doing their part to help the town grow. What little money John ever had to spend in town didn’t help nobody much, including him. In fairness, the towns people had never, what you’d call, took sides or treated him badly. Still, he could tell, they knew where their bread and butter came from. Before long, John found himself cut off from the best of the open grazing land by one of the big ranches and most of the water in the area by the other one. There had been no violence or gunplay between them, nothing like that. Nothing that would have involved the sheriff or anybody getting hurt. He had never even been warned by the other ranch owners.

CHAPTER 4

Although he’d heard that a farmer or two had supposedly been told to get out or get buried. No, he was simply squeezed out by men with more of everything than he had. He had been taught all his life never to quit, but by the end of the first year after they moved in, John knew there was no way he could fight it. After much thinking on it, he decided if he sold off what cattle he had, left right now he could walk away with a little money in his pockets. That or watch as his cattle starved to death or died of thirst. If he did that, he would be left with nothing. He’d been offered a fair price of twenty dollars a head for his six hundred steers by one of the ranchers. It was no fortune he knew, but at least it would be enough to give him a new start somewhere else. He saw no need in paying men to drive the cattle any farther for very little more money. Maybe even less, if there was trouble on the trail and when had there ever not been. He paid off the boys who’d been working with him their two months back wages and prepared to ride north.

Then he rode away from the ranch, from the only home he’d ever known. Away from the graves of his ma and pa. He rode away with just the clothes on his back, the horse under him and one trailing and nineteen years of memories, both good and bad. That day was the tenth of June in the year of 1861. It was also his nineteenth birthday. He had chosen that day to leave on purpose.

CHAPTER 5

Akind of rebirth he thought to himself. Time to start a new life somewhere else. The money he received from his cattle sale, after paying the men their wages and buying trail supplies left him a little over a hundred dollars in his pocket in gold and silver. The other eleven thousand seven hundred dollars was tucked safely in the bank over in Fort Worth until he found another place that he liked.

When things had first started going