1866. On a sun-drenched stretch of West Texas prairie, the Terry brothers are playing near their family ranch when a Kiowa war party suddenly descends. Former Texas Ranger RL Terry returns to total devastation: his home in flames, his wife Sally mortally wounded, and his two boys carried off into captivity.

With the help of his close friend, the great cattleman Charles Goodnight, Terry begins a relentless search for his missing sons. He rides across the vast Southern plains and into the heartland of the Comanche Empire, where buffalo hunters massacre the great herds that once blackened the horizon and soldiers under Colonel Ranald Mackenzie wage brutal campaigns to exterminate the tribes. Meanwhile, Terry’s eldest, Sam, realizes that if he is to survive his captivity, he must abandon his old life for a new one. Under the tutelage of the legendary Comanche chief Quanah Parker, he takes a new name and slowly learns the ways of a proud, embattled people.

Years pass. Track is laid, fences go up, and reservation lines redraw the map of the West. Sam forgets the world of his childhood, and father and son find themselves on opposite sides of an existential conflict. Their paths are destined to cross at the Battle of Palo Duro Canyon, where the captured horse herds are slaughtered by the thousands and the fate of the Comanche nation hangs in the balance.

The story unfolds across two eras: the brutal post–Civil War frontier and the 1920s, where an aging Goodnight is cared for by a devoted young woman and a historian determined to record his memories. As they draw out his stories of blazing the Goodnight-Loving Trail and settling the land once known as Comancheria, the old plainsman reflects on the clash of cultures that defined the American West—and must at last confront the full truth of what passed between him and his old friend RL Terry.

Praise for The Beauty of the Days Gone By:

“[A] magnificent chronicle of the taming of West Texas . . . Beautifully written, fully researched.”—Dennis McCarthy, author of The Gospel According to Billy the Kid