Sand Hills Sioux (ePub)

Jessup Pike's vision was clear. When the War Between the States ended and the South began to produce again, his land in the north would quickly lose value as would the crops he raised and timber he harvested. While considering his family's future, he seized on President Lincoln signing the Homestead as an answer, seeing clearly how western land was cheap and could be had for little while ranching would be soon an answer to growing cities feeding their people.
Off fighting for the Union, his oldest son Mitchell could not scout for their new home and middle son Step was needed to help run the farm operations and his daughter Katherine was caring for all needful doing in their home while his wife ailed. Only his youngest son Adam could perform the required duty of finding good land with graze and ample water so the decision was made between Jessup and his wife.
Weeks past fifteen, a man in every respect, Adam Pike rode from the only home he ever knew, all the teaching of his kin packed between his ears and a pair of saddlebags loaded with what he gear could carry on the back of a willful, blonde horse named Molly. Built like a bull, owning a mind more keen than men three times his age, Pike faces a vast empty frontier emptied by a War draining every able bodied man east and finds in it opportunity for any with a willingness for hard work.
Meeting well-meaning sheriffs, brutally mean cowhands, and a rancher able to teach a youngster much about life, Adam confronts Indians intent on preserving their ways and cheating freighters hauling goods across brown prairie while encountering a sly, seductive widow with lessons of her own. Adapting to ways unfamiliar as part of discovering worlds he little knew existed, Pike puts to test values of honesty, loyalty, fair play and thrift to tame a wilderness and create for his kin opportunity for their futures.
Sand Hills Sioux is the first of seven books, each a self-contained story, describing exploits and challenges of a youngster driven to meet his duty as he rides a trail through the West. Crossing paths with the French invasion of Mexico, gold rush madness and bands of outlaws willing to murder to hold their position in a lawless Colorado Territory, Pike is forced away from his upbringing of decency into a life focused solely on survival until civilization catches up to him and his kin.
Meticulously researched and historically sound, Western Settler Saga reaches across philosophic, geopolitical and economic boundaries to become a new voice telling how America's West was settled.