Buffalo Trail -- Jeff Guinn

Buffalo Trail is the second book in a trilogy about a young man named Cash McClendon.  In Glorious, the first book of the trilogy, McClendon leaves St. Louis after some misadventures there and travels to Arizona, where his life really falls apart.  The back story is covered adequately in Buffalo Trail, so you don't have to have read the first book to know what's going on.  Now McClendon finds himself in Dodge City.  He's beginning to realize that the mess of his life is his own fault, and he wants to make things right.  He plans to return to Arizona, but first he needs money.  That's why he falls in with a buffalo hunter named Bat Masterson.

Masterson and McClendon don't have a lot of luck as buffalo hunters because the buffalo are about gone.  Mostly they collect and sell the bones that successful hunters in the past left lying around.  A man named Billy Dixon (like Masterson and just about everyone else in the novel, a real historical person) has a plan, however.  He's going to Texas, to a place called Adobe Walls, and set up a hunting camp because he knows the buffalo will soon show up there.  Masterson wants to go along, and so does McClendon.

Meanwhile, in a parallel story, Quanah Parker is trying to stir the Comanches to action to take back their land from the settlers.  They need a great, bold victory, and Quanah finds a way to unite the Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Comanche for an attack.

If you're a Texan, you know what happens: the second battle of Adobe Walls.  (This battle also plays a part in other books I've read recently, Empire of the Summer Moon and Paradise Sky.)  The last part of the novel is taken up with the battle, and it's all action, all the time.  It's also historically accurate, as is the rest of the novel, as Guinn, a former reporter, has gone to great pains to make sure that everything in the story squares with the historical record.

Call Buffalo Trail a historical novel or a western, it's a dandy reading adventure, and it will have you looking forward to the concluding book in the trilogy to find out what happens to Cash McClendon and how he'll be changed by his experience at Adobe Walls.