Call Me the Canyon — Ann Howard Creel

Set in the old west of the 1880's, half-Navajo Madolen Demming leaves her gold-prospector father and her canyon at 15, craving freedom and a life beyond the canyon--that looms just out of her reach. In the end, in the world outside, Madolen finds she needs most of all the life style she once disdained, a way of life lost forever to the modern world. A moving triumphant story of a girl torn between two worlds.