Medicine Road — Will Henry

"Orphans of the North," in Will Henry's words, is a story in which "you will meet no purely instinctive, so-called dumb animals, but only those sensitive wilderness folk who are able, in their mysterious unknown ways, to think and to feel and to communicate with one another, very much as you and I." "Medicine Road" is a story from the time of the mountain men. Jesse Callahan was raised by the Miniconjou Sioux. He now works for Jim Bridger who has a string of trading posts in southern Wyoming Territory. Brigham Young, leader of the Mormons, has sworn to wipe out Bridger's trading posts, and he has chosen Watonga, Black Coyote, of the Arapahoes to lead the onslaught. Jesse falls in love with Lacey O'Mara, a married mother of two children. The guns and ammunition that Jesse is transporting to the trading fort at Green River are what Watonga wants most. This is a tense story of calculating courage, intense and dramatic action, and grim realism told with a native feel for the characters and the wilderness in which they play out their fates.