Hanging Woman Creek

Hanging Woman Creek is a western novel by Louis L'Amour, published in 1964. Its two central figures, Barnabus Pike and Eddie Holt, are working men rather than gunmen: Pike is no gunfighter and Holt is a boxer in a world that gives him very little room.

Their plan is modest. They intend to get through a brutal winter in a remote Montana line shack, collect the pay they are owed and settle down for good, and nothing in it requires them to take sides in somebody else's argument. Then they cross paths with a hardworking Irish immigrant and his spirited sister, whose land has been burned out from under them, and the fight becomes one they cannot walk away from.

What makes it worse is that one of the people responsible may be an old friend of Pike's, so the two men end up hunted across frozen country while their loyalty is tested from both directions. The novel is about Pike and Holt risking their reputations, their plans and their lives for people they have only just met.