The Angus Series

Ten Shoes Up, populated with horses, saddles, guns, and outlaws, is not a traditional "western". Angus lives alone on a mountain straddling the New Mexico/Colorado border. He doesn't talk much, and carries himself in a way that draws strangers to him like an anvil beckons the hammer. His world view is whatever he can see from the back of his horse. When he decides to come down off his mountain, "all hell breaks loose".

In Book One in The Angus Series (Ten Shoes Up), Angus came down off his mountain refuge, became a US Marshal, and rejoined civilization. That was in 1881. In Book Two, almost two years have passed when Angus gets another assignment. He’s back on the saddle, riding the Rio Chama south to its confluence with the Rio Grande in New Mexico. The Valles Caldera is a pressure cooker novel set in New Mexico’s Jemez Mountains.

After executing a scorched earth campaign, 9,000 survivors were captured and forcibly marched 350 miles from Fort Defiance in Arizona to Fort Sumner in New Mexico. Today, it’s known as the “Navajo Long Walk.” Fort Sumner was built specifically at the Bosque Redondo to house the Navajo people and make them farmers, not warriors. Marshal Angus leads a stage coach, commissioned by the Smithsonian Institute, along the same route known as the Navajo Long Walk. The passengers on The Last Stage to Bosque Redondo have a story to tell. This is it.

In the summer of 1901 in the Iron Mountain area of Wyoming, someone shot from ambush and killed a 14-year old boy. The kill shot hit him in the back and knocked him o his dad's horse. Some thought Tom Horn did it. They narrowed the search down to him, and got him to confess, they said. He never said. His arrest, trial, and execution by hanging commenced a controversy that roared through the Rocky Mountains for over 100 years. That true story is the historical predicate for this novel.