Radigan

by Louis L’Amour

First published 1958

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4.5(2,983)

Tom Radigan has spent four years building a ranch on Vache Creek when Angelina Foley arrives with a Spanish land grant and claims that the property belongs to her. Foley brings thousands of cattle and a force of armed men, expecting Radigan to leave before winter closes the country. He refuses, convinced that abandoning the ranch would mean surrendering everything he has worked to establish.

The dispute becomes a test of endurance as weather, isolation and armed pressure narrow Radigan’s options. Foley is not simply a distant claimant: she is intelligent, determined and willing to use the resources at her disposal, making the conflict as much a contest of will as of gunfire. The novel centres on the precarious nature of landholding in the western frontier, where old grants, new settlement and physical possession can produce rival claims that local institutions are poorly equipped to settle.