The Raiders: Sons of Texas
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4.3 • 27 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In 1816, Mordecai Lewis, a veteran of Andrew Jackson's Indian campaigns and battles against the British, moves his family into the western Tennessee canebrakes. But Mordecai, a born wanderer, is not satisfied with farming, and with his sons Michael and Andrew and some other backwoodsmen, he leads a foray into Spanish-held Texas to hunt wild horses and return the mustang herd to sell in Tennessee.
Crossing the Sabine River, Mordecai's party encounters a Spanish patrol determined to repel all American invaders. After a bloody skirmish leaves their father dead, Michael and Andrew find their way back to their Tennessee farm.
Five years later, after the Spanish government in Mexico City has agreed to permit 300 American families to settle in Texas, the Lewis brothers have their opportunity to re-enter Texas. They ride to the frontier town of Natchitoches, Louisiana, where Michael falls in love with Marie Villaret, daughter of a wealthy French landowner, then cross the Sabine to find Stephen F. Austin, a Missouri entrepreneur in charge of the new American colony.
But the Lewises are considered interlopers and horse thieves and are dogged by a patrol led by the same ruthless Spanish officer who killed their father five years before.
Sons of Texas is the first volume in a trilogy that follows the lives and adventures of the Lewis family through the era of the Alamo and Texas Independence under Sam Houston.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The second volume of this prolific western writer's Sons of Texas trilogy (after Sons of Texas) is a colorful, if action-deficient, lesson in Texas history 1825 1826. Along with brothers Michael and Andrew Lewis, most of the characters from the first novel return and not much about them has changed. Michael has a family now, but is just as restless as in the first book; Andrew is still the steady one, a bachelor who longs for a wife. Owning adjacent farms in Mexican territory, the Lewises are trying to settle as legal immigrants, alongside hundreds of other Americans allowed by the Mexican government to live there. As Michael and Andrew struggle to farm Texas's forbidding terrain, they become involved in an Indian raid, rekindle a long-standing family feud and get tangled up in the complex comedy of the Fredonian Rebellion, "the earliest glimmering of the Texas revolution against Mexico." Fans may grow frustrated as this horse opera unfolds largely without gunplay even the bad guys are reluctant to pull the trigger but Kelton masterfully portrays the toughness of frontier life and the racial, cultural and political tension between Mexicans and Americans that eventually led to open rebellion. The final volume in this trilogy will include the battle of the Alamo; hopefully, there the action and suspense will catch up with the period detail.
