Promotional placeholder artwork created for this website package. It may be replaced later with approved official cover art.
Days of the River Rider
Set in Texas' Big Bend country during a 1943 foot-and-mouth cattle quarantine along the Rio Grande, this novel follows river rider John Bearman through solitude, duty, danger, and the emotional costs of life in the borderlands.
Publication
TCU Press, 2026
Setting
Big Bend country and the Rio Grande borderlands, 1943
Genre
Historical fiction / Western / literary fiction
Ideal Readers
Readers of Texas fiction, Westerns, Big Bend writing, and borderland history
A river, a quarantine, and lives under pressure.
At the height of a foot-and-mouth cattle quarantine, John Bearman patrols the river as an isolated rider charged with protecting the borderlands. His routine life of books, music, and duty is disrupted when he meets Annie Tinsley, a rancher's wife whose own hardship mirrors the severity of the land.
As the story opens outward, the novel enters a world of smuggling, violence, survival, and difficult attachment. It is at once a Western, a border novel, and a deeply human story about isolation, resilience, tenderness, loss, and redemption.
A perfect centerpiece for the site.
Because this novel speaks directly to readers who love Big Bend and the upper Rio Grande, it naturally anchors the entire website. The design language of canyon walls, river roads, aged paper, and classic Western typography all flows from this book's world.
It also provides the ideal gateway into Fleming's larger body of work by showing how deeply his fiction is tied to the land and history of Texas.