The patriarch of the family, Barnabas Sackett, becomes a merchant captain and eventually settles with his wife Abigail (née Tempany) in what will become the borderlands of North Carolina and Tennessee.
Several Clinch Mountain Sacketts also show up in "Ride the River" to help cousin Echo.
The founders of the three families were contemporaries as well: Tatton Chantry (the first who used the name Chantry, hero of the novel "Fair Blows the Wind") and a famous pirate called Talon (who took the name after the hook he used for a lost hand) were contemporaries of Barnabas Sackett, around the year 1600.
The desert watering hole was named for cavalry Lt. Delos B. Sackett who was an Indian fighter in the region before the Civil War.
L'Amour has used names and places that roughly parallel a real branch of the Sackett Family, but the accounts are fictional.
Sackett's Land, published in 1974, is the first novel chronologically of the Sackett novels, taking place around AD 1600 in England (including The Fens and Queen Elizabeth I's London), on the Atlantic Ocean, and the Atlantic Seaboard of North America, particularly in the vicinity of Cape Hatteras.
It starred Sam Elliott as Tell Sackett, Tom Selleck as Orrin, and Jeff Osterhage as Tyrel, but also featured parts for Western movie veterans, including Glenn Ford, Gilbert Roland, Jack Elam, Slim Pickens, Pat Buttram, Ben Johnson, and Mercedes McCambridge (as "Ma Sackett").
Spends much time away from home and eventually quits the hills of North Carolina for the Rocky Mountains.
Rough, two-fisted, a man "with the bark on", and with a deserved reputation as being fast with a gun and hell-on wheels in any kind of fight, he has ridden the Outlaw Trail and admits to skirting the dark side of the law on more than one occasion.
Rough and dangerous, with a hefty reputation as a very bad man to fool around with, he has a strong sense of right and wrong.
Finds a lost treasure of great value and spends several years in a Mexican prison before finally escaping and being rescued by his son.
Their father liked his horses fast, his drinks hard, and his preachers Hellfire hot, and raised his three sons accordingly.
A hard, tough, quiet man who wants only to be left alone, it takes very little to anger Tell, and he will fight like a rabid wolf if pushed, as several men have found out – usually, it's the last mistake they make.
He takes any job that suits him at the moment, from cowhand to miner, and drifts, rarely staying in one place any great length of time.
He's killed several men in his lifetime, is fast and deadly accurate with any kind of gun, as well as the Tinker-made knife he carries.
Although outwardly he appears rough, he has a sound, strong moral character, never forgetting his father's rule of "...always ride on the side of the law, never against it".
Good with a gun, and always ready with a smile and a quote, he's strong willed and completely devoted to his family.
He then married the treacherous Laura Pritts who tried to use him as part of her bigoted father's land grab in Santa Fe against the settled Mexican landowners.
After her fraud is exposed, Laura attempts to lure William Tell into Apache country to rescue her nonexistent son with Orrin, a plan which fails.
Always honest and straightforward, the fights that Orrin usually finds himself a part of are generally started by his steadfast and unwavering attitude toward what he believes in strongly.
He was elected sheriff of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where his reputation as a man fair to all ethnicities, Hispanic and Anglo alike, gained him respect.
Wherever Tyrel goes, he seems to attract trouble, and sooner or later someone always tries to outdraw him, but never succeeds – by his own admission: "Till the day I hung 'em up, I was the fastest gun alive."
In Santa Fe he is forced to kill Tom Sunday, a close friend who'd gone bad after losing what he saw as his last chance to start a new life, which affects him deeply.
Naive where women are concerned, Tyrel often seems like a shy schoolboy when facing a pretty girl.
The first of these books was "The Daybreakers" which introduced the Sackett family to fans of Wild West fiction.
In "The Sackett Companion", L'Amour described "The Man From the Broken Hills" as being a Talon book.
In so doing, he had already begun creating a single saga that was built around the Sacketts and reflected how L'Amour wanted to describe the settling of the American frontiers in an entertaining and, yet, a relatively accurate historical and cultural way with bigger than life characters.
According to Wikipedia, historical records show that Hickok was marshal of Abilene only in the year of 1871 which makes the setting of "Chancy" to be 1871.