Project biographer Patrick Dearen’s new university press book, The Big Drift, A Novel, has just been released by TCU Press. Dearen’s twenty-first book, The Big Drift is set against the backdrop of the great cattle migration of 1884, when a blizzard drove thousands of open-range beeves down from the Great Plains. The animals flooded West Texas and piled up on the Pecos and Devils rivers, where they soon grazed the banks bare. Not even an 1885 roundup by hundreds of cowhands could keep the cattle from dying by the thousands. Dearen based this historical novel on interviews with nineteenth-century cowhands, newspaper records, and archival research at several locations across the Southwest. In a back cover blurb, six-time Spur Award winner Richard S. Wheeler calls The Big Drift “the very essence of what great fiction should be.”
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