Empty Ground

In 1849, a seventeen-year-old Irish immigrant named Declan Shea stands at the Powder River and watches sixty million buffalo come over a rise. By 1883, he rides the same country and cannot find eleven.Between those two moments lies a life. Declan learns his trade on the northern plains-the Sharps rifle, the skinning knife, the arithmetic of a hide taken clean. He takes a Cheyenne name he did not choose: Heávohe. He works beside a ruined man named Bill until the day Bill stops working. He crosses paths with a Crow woman named Ashkáale in a willow draw and keeps crossing paths with her for twenty-five years without ever finding the four words that might have mattered.Told in the spare, unsparing prose of American literary realism, Empty Ground is the story of a man who understood exactly what he was doing on a continent that had decided to let him do it-and of the people who watched it happen from the ground they were losing.For readers of Paulette Jiles, James Welch, Guy Vanderhaeghe, and Kent Haruf. William Mann writes literary fiction grounded in place and history. His work ranges from autofiction to historical novels of the American West, with a particular interest in landscapes shaped by hard weather and harder choices.He lives full-time on the road in an RV with his wife, Chris, and their two dogs, Bronn and Sadie, traveling the country in pursuit of the terrain his books inhabit - the high plains of Montana, the Black Hills, the rolling creek country of southeast Kansas. He writes in the early mornings, before the day gets in the way.The Long Reckoning, his ongoing historical series, examines the American frontier through the lives of those who lived its endings.