Strap Buckner — A historical novel in development

Where history gives way to memory, and the telling begins to matter as much as the truth.

Aylett C. “Strap” Buckner was a real pioneer who lived in a part of Texas history that most people don’t spend much time in.

Before Stephen F. Austin. Before Sam Houston. Before David Crockett and the figures later tied to the battles at the Alamo and San Jacinto became legend, there were men like Buckner. Present in the making of it, but not carried forward in the same way.

What remains of him survives in fragments. Some recorded. Some remembered. Some reshaped over time into something larger—or quieter—than what may have been.

This story lives in that space.

Told in a reflective first-person voice, Strap Buckner follows a young man leaving Virginia and moving steadily toward the unsettled edge of Spanish Texas, where shifting loyalties, failed expeditions, and hard ground test what a man is made of.

Through the Gutiérrez–Magee expedition, the collapse at Medina, and the uncertain years that follow, Strap moves through a world that does not hold still long enough to be understood cleanly. What he survives becomes as important as how it is remembered.

As the distance between events and memory grows, so does the question of what remains true—and what has endured in the telling.

• Historical fiction grounded in documented events
• A first-person retrospective shaped by memory and time
• A story that allows myth and truth to exist alongside one another
   

This is not a retelling meant to resolve the past.

It is an attempt to sit with it.

(Opening of Chapter 1)

...The shouting started before sundown was finished with us.

It came hard across the yard, cutting through wagon noise, cookfire talk, and the low end-of-day grumble of tired people wanting food before dark. The last light had turned the dust a dull copper. It hung in the air, sticking to sweat, leather, and the wet necks of horses.

“¡Toro! ¡Toro suelto!”

A barefoot boy tore past me fast enough to sling dirt on my boots. He nearly clipped my shoulder, caught himself, and kept going.

I didn’t know much Spanish then, but I knew fear when I heard it in a voice. A bull was loose.

By the time I reached the fence line, half the camp was already there and the other half was trying to decide whether to run toward the noise or away from it. Two vaqueros shoved through the gate with ropes in hand, their horses sidestepping and blowing hard. Somebody yelled for room. Somebody else yelled to shoot the brute. Nobody worth listening to paid much mind to either one.

That was the sort of camp—half work, half confusion, held together by tired people and habit.

A yellow dog came flying out from under a wagon with a strip of stolen beef in his mouth, took one look at the yard, and decided he had urgent business somewhere else.

Then I saw the bull.

He stood in the middle of the yard black as charred timber, hide slick with sweat that caught the lowering sun like oil. Thick through the neck. Broad in the chest. Not one of your long-ranging stock beasts built mostly to wander and endure. This one was compact and mean-looking, a black criollo bull made for close quarters and bad temper. His horns didn’t spread wide. They came forward low and narrow, like they had been laid out for opening a man from belly to throat. A torn strip of red cloth hung from one horn and stirred once in the evening light.

He was no stock animal.

He looked like trouble....

© 2026 by Duskin Hill. Excerpt from an unpublished manuscript. All rights reserved.

This manuscript is currently in submission status. 

The book cover shown is merely a concept at this stage.

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