Cattle Drive

“Cattle Drive,” by Western author Big Jim Williams, is a fictional tale of an 1873 cattle drive across North Texas during a hot summer, a cattleman’s desperate attempt to push 3,000 longhorns to a market to avoid financial ruin. The tale includes a cattle stampede, gun battles, gamblers, double crosses, greed, broken promises, soiled doves, 11 dead bodies, and Western action Big Jim hopes readers will enjoy. When a water baron refuses to sell water to save the cattleman’s dying herd, that leads to gunplay spearheaded by Buck Longworth, the cattle drive’s reluctant trail boss, and his sidekick, Rafferty O’Rourke. The “Cattle Drive” book also comes with a twist ending. “Cattle Drive,” Big Jim says, is a book he started writing nights and weekends years ago while working fulltime as a publicist grinding out press releases that often boarded on fiction. Big Jim loves writing Western fiction, says it’s great to let ones imagination ride through the Old West in search of cowboys, outlaws, legends, pioneers, ladies of the night and bonnet-clad women, and, “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly,” if he may steal a movie title from Clint Eastwood. “Cattle Drive” is Big Jim Williams’ first novel. However, his many Western stories have appeared in magazines, Websites, and anthologies. His collected short stories are in two audio books, “Tall Tales of The Old West,” which Big Jim narrated, and, “The Old West.”