Rarely does a book live up to its title. Clyde Milner and Carol O’Connor’s biography of Montana pioneer Granville Stuart, As Big As the West, is an exception.

Two or three times a year, the Grammy-award winning cowboy quartet Riders in the Sky performs with a symphony orchestra as part of a Pops series. However, when the band joined the Nashville Symphony Orchestra for three sold-out performances at Schermerhorn Hall in February 2009, it was a unique experience decades in the making.

From its inception as a ragtag band of men charged with protecting settlers in the Texas territory from roving bands of cannibalistic Indians, to decades spent warring with outlaws, Comanche, Mexican banditos, and Union soldiers, Cox takes readers on a compelling and unflinching journey through the checkered past of the legendary Texas Rangers in the first of this two-volume series.

With winters that killed entire herds of cattle, bitter drought, and countless other hardships, it’s a wonder that the West was ever settled. The Weak Ones Turned Back, The Cowards Never Started: A Century of Ranching in Montana, published by the Montana Stockgrowers Association (MSGA), tells the stories of 142 present-day, working ranch families in Montana that not only survived, but thrived.