Stand Proud

The Spur Award–winning author's literary portrait of a West Texas cattle rancher who lives to see the end of the Old West—and the demise of his own legend.

Frank Claymore is not as easy to like as he is to admire. He's always been cantankerous, stubborn, and intolerant—just the qualities that make him a success as an open-range cattle rancher on the West Texas frontier. In Stand Proud, renowned Western author Elmer Kelton follows Claymore from his days scouting Indians during the Civil War to the dawn of the Twentieth Century.


Claymore lives through marriage, births, deaths, and a creeping change in the society that once hailed him as a hero. That same society later has him condemned as a despoiler and tried for murder. Based in part on legendary rancher Charles Goodnight, Claymore is only one example of the many men who dreamed of cattle, and through their dedication to that dream came to change the face of Western history.