Savage Country

From the writer of the bestselling Coal Black Horse, who has consistently created riveting fiction about pivotal moments in history, comes another spellbinding novel covering one of the most infamous hunts in the American West.

In September 1873, Elizabeth Coughlin, a widow bankrupted by her husband’s folly and death, embarks on a buffalo hunt with her estranged and mysterious brother-in-law. With no money, no family, no job or security, she hopes to salvage something of her former life and the lives of the hired men and women who depend on her, and the buffalo hunt that her husband had planned, she now realizes, was his last hope for saving the land.

Elizabeth and Michael plunge south across the aptly named Deadline demarcating Indian Territory from their home state of Kansas. Nothing could have prepared them for the dangers: rattlesnakes, rabies, wildfire, lightning strikes, blue northers, flash floods, threats to life in so many ways. They’re on borrowed time: the Comanche are in winter quarters, and the cruel work is unraveling their souls. They must get back alive.

This is a gripping, historically accurate account of that infamous hunt, which decimated the bison population to near extinction--the story of a moment in our history in which mass destruction of an animal population was seen as the only route to economic solvency. And it is also a thrilling, readable tale of how that hunt changed Michael and Elizabeth forever.

Robert Olmstead is the author of eight previous books. Coal Black Horse was the winner of the Heartland Prize for Fiction. The Coldest Night was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Far Bright Star was the winner of the Western Writers of America Spur Award. Olmstead is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an NEA grant and is a professor at Ohio Wesleyan University.