The Year After Custer

Historical Western Drama

1877, the year after Sitting Bull’s victory at Little Big Horn, and settlers, farmers, miners and townspeople in the new American northwest are afraid the local Indian nations will rise with the Sioux in all out war. The mightiest of the local nations – the Nez Perce – is forced from their land in the Wallowa Valley and attempt to escape to Canada on a 1700 mile retreat, chased by five U.S. Armies.

EXCERPT

Artist rendering of Chief Joseph,
known in the press at the time as “The Napoleon of the Plains” for his strategic retreat across the new Oregon, Idaho & Montana territories.

The Year After Custer is scheduled for release as an
e-book in February 2012.

A  WEEK AFTER JULY 4TH, EPHRAIM PAULSEN felt like someone had driven a ring-thread nail into his gum. He was threatening to have the blacksmith hammer the son-of-a-bitch eye tooth out of his head but his wife told him, "E.J., why is it you're afraid of nothing but dentists?"  

     "If you had my teeth−"

  “I'm not rich enough to have your teeth, darling, but you got to see this new dentist. He's got an ADA certificate on his wall and plenty of laughing gas."

    "I like my old dentist..."

    "So did I but he's in St. Louis. Be reasonable, Ephraim. I don't want you to be in pain, sweetheart. Do it for me."

     Alma was a gracious and lovely woman, in the prime years of her life. Twenty years before, the first time he had seen her at Lapwai, Alma had been the most beautiful thing Ephraim Jacob Paulsen had ever encountered.

    Her father had been a fur trapper from Quebec in Canada who had taken an Indian wife, then left her when he went back East, a common enough behavior for white men in those days. Those children − half-breeds − normally grow up Indian because that was the only society that would take them in but it was different for Alma. She had mostly been raised at the Lapwai Reserve by Christian missionaries. While most Indian girls learned basket weaving and sewed buffalo hides, Alma wanted nothing more than to go to St. Louis or Chicago or New York or any of those other places she'd read about. She'd even learned to play the piano.

     She was a white girl in an Indian body, Paulsen liked to say. Thin and long limbed, wide-eyed as a deer, exotic and wild. Back then, he was prospecting and needed an interpreter and someone who knew the Wallowa mountains. Who better than one of the local redskins? So he'd promised her the world she wanted and she'd run off with him. She was fifteen.

    Raised by missionaries, who'd ever have thought she'd be so carnal − but that she was. At first she was just excited by sex and wanted to do anything Ephraim could think of doing, and she wanted to keep doing it, she liked it that much.