James Luke Landon was born in the United States to a father who was a cotton farmer and a shrewd business man. After the Civil War, labor was almost impossible to find to work the cotton fields. Luke's father enlisted the aid of a friend who lived overseas and moved his family to Bombay, India, where land prices were cheap, labor was abundant, and cotton grew with a vengeance.

At the age of nineteen, Luke lost his father in a warehouse fire and his mother to a heart attack shortly afterward. His father had built a multi-million dollar empire from cotton and textile mills.

Intrigued by the Dime Novels about the American West as a child, young Luke decided to pursue the dream of living like his heroes and moved back to American. He stayed a while with some friends of his father's before deciding to leave for St. Louis. Always out to borrow money from him, Luke decided to prank the four brothers with whom he had stayed. He never dreamed that it would eventually lead him down a path to Texas, befriended by a cattle rancher, and enlisting the aid of two Texas Rangers.