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 done 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 and stuck to sweat and 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 did not know much Spanish then, but I knew fear when I heard it. 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 it was—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. I could not fault him.

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 did not 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 did not look like stock.

He looked like trouble.

He struck the ground.

You could feel it.

Two vaqueros had ropes on him, their horses leaning back with everything they had. It did not amount to much. He jerked them sideways as if they were boys pulling at brush.

“¡Cuidado!”

He lunged and one rider hit the ground hard enough to draw a groan from the crowd.

Someone near me muttered the name.

“Triste Noche.”

Sad night.

It fit him well enough.

I had no thought then of stepping into that yard. I was against the fence same as everybody else, watching a bad beast make fools of men who had likely handled worse than I had.

A tall fellow near me leaned over and said, “What’s he saying?”

“Likely that we’re in the wrong place,” I said.

That got some nervous laughter. One fool in a sun-bleached hat climbed two rails higher and yelled for somebody to shoot the bull from the safety of three bodies back. Another started giving rope advice in English to men who plainly knew more about rope than he ever would. A one-eyed cook hollered over somebody’s overturned wash pot and cursed in two languages without slowing down in either one.

The bull did not care for any of it.

A rope flew and missed.

Triste Noche wheeled so fast the loose end cracked through the dust like a whip. One horse lost footing and slid sideways. The downed rider scrambled clear on hands and knees with the bull’s hooves striking dirt behind him hard enough to send clods flying.

That was the moment the crowd changed...

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 Excerpt from an unpublished manuscript.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

This manuscript is currently in final reader review and nearing submission. The book cover shown is merely a concept at this stage.

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