Elmer Kelton’s the Familiar Stranger: A Hewey Calloway Adventure

Elmer Kelton’s Hewey Calloway, one of the best-loved cowboys in all of Western fiction, returns in this novel of his middling years, as he looks for work--but not too much work--in 1904 West Texas.

Hewey Calloway had intended to pass straight through Durango, Colorado, en route to visit a friend several miles northeast of the city. He had left his home range about a year before, with a herd of young horses. It was supposed to be a relatively straightforward affair; deliver the horses, collect the payment, and return home with the money. Things got out of hand, however, and there he was in Durango a year later with plans to go north rather than south. Oh, well, he thought, he had always wanted to see new country.

It isn’t long before his travels lead him to a cabin on a rainy night. There he meets a young man, sick as a dog, who weakly tries to send him off. And for good reason: the man has smallpox, and soon enough, Hewey catches the deadly disease. The man cares for him in turn, and it’s just as he is feeling better that the man disappears. The next morning a Pinkerton detective turns up with posse, looking for a wanted bank robber.

As he travels north, Hewey seems to run in with both the young man who tended to him, as well as the detective. But something seems off about the Pinkerton detective, and Hewey keeps his mouth shut. When he reuinites with his friend Hanley, they do everything they can to get to the bottom of the mystery that threatens both theirs and this young man’s life.

STEVE KELTON (1951-2022) spent 42 years as an editor for the San Angelo-based Livestock Weekly. A West Texas native, he was the son of the late Western novelist and livestock journalist Elmer Kelton. During his youth, Steve spent as much time as possible on the McElroy Ranch in West Texas’s Crane and Upton counties. Managed by his grandfather, Buck Kelton, the McElroy was where Elmer and his brothers grew up. Aside from journalism, Steve was the author of the nonfiction books, Renderbrook, A Century Under The Spade Brand, a history of the Renderbrook Spade ranch in West Texas; and Grassroots Legacy, a commissioned history of the Texas Farm Bureau’s first 50 years.

JOHN BRADSHAW is a West Texas native and award-winning journalist who has written for the San Angelo-based Livestock Weekly for nearly twenty years. He is an avid horseman and a livestock producer. He lives outside the small town of Abernathy with his wife Sara. Elmer Kelton’s The Familiar Stranger is his first book.