In the Pecos Country
1894
The Pecos Valley, 1850s. A party of New England settlers ventures into territory that maps render nearly blank, only rumor and danger mark the way. Led by the iron-willed Caleb Barnwell, they seek to build New Boston in the Upper Pecos valley, convinced that Manifest Destiny has ordained their mission. But the land already belongs to someone. Enter Lone Wolf, the Apache chief whose reputation precedes him like thunder on the horizon. The settlers dismiss the warnings of grizzled scout Sut Simpson, whose years in the territory have taught him to read danger the way other men read weather. Young Fred Munson arrives as their naive hope, a friend to the settlers who will have to find courage he doesn't know he possesses when the arrows begin to fly. Ellis captures the brutal arithmetic of frontier life: ambition against reality, certainty against experience, the romance of settlement against its bloody cost. This is a window into how Americans once imagined their westward march, its bravado, its blindness, its terrible price. For readers who want adventure that also functions as cultural artifact, showing what frontier fiction meant to a generation that lived it.
