Followers of Conrad Richter and his writings about the American frontier should revel in the eight short stories in this collection—all dealing, as the titular story suggests, with "The Rawhide Knot" of marriage and the battle of the sexes with each other, the land, and society out West. And a changing, shifting West it is—in time, space, and idea—for Richter and for the reader.

After reading these stories, some of which first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post of the 1930s and '40s and served as practice runs for longer prize-winning fiction like his Ohio trilogy, "The Awakening Land," Richter's West somehow seems at once more real and more fantastic, less ideal (and idyllic) and more alluring than, for example, the cities and "urban sprawl" now manifesting the results, the communal destiny of frontier settlement and "progress."…

Richter's imagined, vicarious West took him and...