The Daybreakers

The Daybreakers is a novel by the American writer Louis L'Amour, published in 1960 and set in the United States of 1867.

Tyrel Sackett is the younger brother and the one with the reputation for shooting straight; Orrin is the talker, the singer and the politician of the pair. They leave Tennessee with a killing behind them and travel to New Mexico, where they meet men on both sides of a fight over land that is being taken from its Mexican owners by paperwork. The brothers buy cattle, build a ranch and send for their mother, and the novel follows the ordinary work of making a place for themselves alongside the quarrels and gunfights that keep interrupting it. Cattle, horses and land are the business of the book, and the shooting is what interrupts the business. It is the first novel L'Amour wrote about the Sacketts, and the family's other stories came later, several of them set earlier.

The novel introduced a family the author returned to across seventeen books.