Conrad Richter has reclaimed two segments of the American past widely separated in geography and time. Early Americana is a collection of stories about buffalo hunters, cowpunchers, and homesteaders in the region of the Staked Plains, the Llano Estacado of Southwest border history. The Sea of Grass holds within its brief framework the sweep and drama of the cow country at the end of the last century, when cattlemen fought to hold their free range against the nester's fence and plow. Tacey Cromwell has for its background the Arizona mining town of Bisbee in its roaring boom days, a contrast between the lusty, swarming life of Brewery Gulch and the prim respectability of Quality Hill. The Trees and The Fields trace the growth of a pioneer settlement in the territory west of the Alleghenies and north of the Ohio River. In an age of period-piece fiction stuffed with...