Hot Biscuits: Eighteen Stories by Women and Men of the Ranching West

For more than twenty years Max Evans has been trying to assemble a book of stories by working cowboys-men who were ranch hands with at least five years of paid experience and women who had either been raised on ranches or joined their husbands on a double hire-out for five years or more. With the expert help of Candy Moulton he has succeeded in collecting eighteen stories set in the Working West after 1920 that meet his inflexible requirements: experience plus imagination plus innate writing ability.

As Evans notes in his introduction, subdivisions, condos, and ranchettes are shrinking the Working West every day: "Some of those who once lived it, and those few who are so agonizingly still working it with bloodied souls, must put it down on paper. . . . If we fail to act with immediacy the truth will continue to dissipate. . . with frightening rapidity."

The stories in this anthology range as wide as the Rockies, from a murder mystery to the tale of a unique horse trainer, to a family's desperate battle against a grass and forest fire to the story of a world famous violinist. But they share a common denominator: biscuits. Almost every story includes hot biscuits as a feature of daily life in the Working West. Biscuits, it turns out, are more important in western life than guns and maybe more than coffee. In the West, people who could make superior biscuits received more respect than the mayor and the police chief combined.

The authors of the stories in Hot Biscuits are Taylor Fogerty, J. P. S. Brown, Willard Holopeter, Elaine Long, Sinclair Browning, Slim Randles, Lori Van Pelt, Grem Lee, Dick Hyson, Sally C. Bates, Virginia Bennett, Curt Brummett, Jimbo Brewer, Paula Paul, Helen C. Avery, Gwen Peterson, and the editors.

Max Evans, the author of Bluefeather Fellini, The Rounders, The Hi Lo Country, and twenty-two other books, lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He received the Owen Wister Award for lifelong contributions to the field of western literature from the Western Writers of America.

Candy Vyvey Moulton has written or co-written eleven books on western history and has won the Spur Award. Moulton makes her home near Encampment, Wyoming, where she edits the Western Writers of America Roundup Magazine.