A Thousand Dead Horses — Rod Miller

"Based on a historic horse-stealing adventure, A Thousand Dead Horses dramatizes the violence and perils of the Old West. Young Daniel Boone Trewick flees a violent dispute in Missouri and joins a freighting outfit to Santa Fe. He meets mountain man Thomas L. "Pegleg" Smith and is invited to join an expedition to California to steal horses and mules. Juan Medina, a young vaquero on a California rancho, framed for a crime and in jail, is pressed into service in a posse pursuing the thieves and three thousand horses and mules stolen in coordinated raids. During the chase, a thousand horses die in the Mojave Desert. Circumstances throw Boone and Juan together, and they hatch a plan to turn stolen animals into a profitable future"--