Texas Forsaken
Coming May 2024
The Comanches tore Eyes-Like-Sky (Maggie) Logan’s life apart seven years ago. But she survived and adapted, married a Comanche warrior and had a baby. English and her past life are vague shadows. In one terrible battle, the U.S. Cavalry destroys her world. She is taken captive again, this time by those who call themselves her people, but they are not. Forced into a world, she wants nothing to do with, Eyes-Like-Sky fights to keep her child. Her only hope is an alliance with the man who killed her husband.
Captain Garret Ramsey enrolled in West Point to escape his overbearing father. Assigned to the Texas frontier, Garret finds himself caught up in an Indian war in which both sides commit atrocities. Plagued by guilt for his own role, he seeks redemption by taking responsibility for Eyes-Like-Sky and her child. He is determined to do whatever it takes to protect them, even if it costs him everything he has, and he loses heart in the process. What future can there be with a woman whose heart is buried in a grave?
PRE-ORDER LINKS:
The Shenandoah Valley Before and During the Civil War
- The valley is in western Virginia and nestled between the Alleghenies and Blue Ridge Mountain Ranges
- The Valley Pike was originally the Warriors Path, and then the Great Wagon Road before eventually becoming a toll road by the eve of the Civil War.
- According to the National Park Service, several Indian tribes settled or traveled through the valley at various times before the first settlers arrived: Shawnee, Northern Iroquois, Catabaws, Delaware, Cherokee, Piedmont Siouans , and Susquehannocks.
- In 1731, Jost Hite led a group of 16 families to become the first European settlers in the valley.
- Hite’s descendants and their spouses built Harmony Hall and Belle Grove which still stand today.
- Breadbasket of the Confederacy and strategic transportation artery
- Stonewall Jackson: “If the Valley is lost, Virginia is lost.”
- It’s estimated that Winchester in the lower Valley (in this case lower means northern) exchanged hands more than 72 times during the war.
- Stonewall Jackson conducted a brilliant military campaign in the valley in the spring of 1862 diverted thousands of Federal soldiers from Richmond for months.
- Executing Grant’s orders to devastate the valley’s agriculture so that “crows flying over for the balance of the season [would] have to carry their provender with them,” General Sheridan used his cavalry to burn the crops, the barns, and the mills, and to confiscate all of the livestock the fall of 1864.
Shenandoah's Daughter
A young woman marched around the corner wearing a raggedy, man’s coat. She clutched a load of kindling in her apron.
Daniel reeled in his temper and sucked in a breath. The girl’s gaze locked onto him— big, brown eyes that could catch a man’s swallow in his throat. Her hair spewed loose across her shoulders and down her back, lovely honey-hued hair that flipped about with the wind beneath an old flop hat. A man’s hat and a man’s work, her red chapped hands strained to hold the load of wood above her green plaid skirt, with no hoop.
He’d seen her before. That hair, the unconventional attire, the hands. But that’d been almost fifty miles from here. At a plantation. A bitter taste rose into the back of his throat. There was no swallowing it away.
Second Excerpt:
From the corner of his eye, he glimpsed Private Baker. The sixteen-year-old recruit hurried toward the outhouse. For a moment, Daniel figured he intended to search that, too. But no, the boy would have his gun up if that was his intention. His gun was down. Baker only meant to relieve himself.
The boy’s hand closed on the door latch as Daniel opened his mouth to tell him to be careful. Time stopped. A single gunshot rent the air, and Baker stumbled backwards to the ground.
