Reckoning at Lansing's Ferry
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It was spring on the Llano Estacado, the Staked Plains of Texas, the time for the cattle drives to push north to the rail heads in Kansas. The "Lost Cause" of the South was still fresh in the mind of Southerners, including fifty-five-year-old Ben Albright, a pioneer of the Texas cattle drives, who was well familiar with the trail and its dangers -- he had made the drive successfully five times in the past. This spring he was in charge of two thousand longhorns and six men, one of whom, Case Hyle, was unknown to him as he had been hired on the trail. But this was the time of Reconstruction and he faced a new enemy -- Yankee soldiers and families who were being granted land in the South. He knew that up ahead was Lansing's Ferry, formerly a trading post and ferry service run by Ewell Lansing. With Ewell's death, Albright had learned that Northerners had moved in, and the growing settlement at Lansing's Ferry had caused trouble for two earlier drives which had ended in the deaths of four men. To add to his trouble, Albright's sister had died, leaving him in charge of his seventeen-year-old-niece. He had no choice but to bring her on the trail. His trail boss and the new man had both taken an interest in her. For Albright, the trail ahead to Dodge City was rife with potential dangers from both the outside and among his own men.