Stage to Lordsburg

The tense frontier ride that John Ford turned into Stagecoach began here: Ernest Haycox's Stage to Lordsburg is a taut, dust-and-gunsmoke classic of the American West. First published in Collier's magazine in 1937, this celebrated tale gathers a mismatched company of passengers – a gambler, an outcast woman, a whiskey drummer, and a fugitive gunman among them – aboard a coach rattling from Tonto, Arizona, toward the New Mexico town of the title, with Apache raiders and private reckonings waiting along the trail. Ernest Haycox (1899 – 1950) was one of the most admired and imitated Western writers of the pulp era, praised for lifting the genre with genuine literary craft. Two years after it appeared, John Ford's 1939 film made its shape famous the world over. Read & Co. Books is delighted to preserve this small masterpiece of the trail in an edition to be treasured.