Angus (Stuart)

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 of this series, Angus is a New Mexico cowboy riding alone and hiding out on a mountain called Ten Shoes Up. He's known by his few, friends as a loner who rides straight-legged, on a tall horse. He's always on the lookout and doesn't talk all that much. Men admire the way he sits a saddle and women wonder if he might dismount. In Book Two, Angus is a Deputy U.S. Marshal. He forms a posse to track down a bandito named Mendoza-Mendoza at the top of The Valles Caldera. He and the posse get, ambushed and an epic gun battle ensues. Book Three is another Angus adventure, but this historical novel also tells the true story of America's first all-Indian concentration camp. For centuries, the Navajo people had peacefully occupied ancestral, aboriginal lands in northwestern New Mexico and Arizona. In 1861, while the eastern half of the country was, engulfed in the Civil War, the Navajos were, decimated by the U.S. Army. Brigadier General James Carlton ordered Col. Kit Carson and his troopers to "cut the Gordian knot with one terrible blow and wipe the whole Navajo nation from the face of the earth." 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 stagecoach, 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 fourteen-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. U.S. Deputy Marshal Angus is sent from Colorado up to the Iron Mountain area near Laramie Wyoming to track down the truth of Tom Horn's so-called confession. He knows a little about Tom Horn's legend-in-the making. He's heard the stories-that Horn claimed, "Killing men is my specialty. I look at it as a business proposition, and I think I have a corner on the market." Tom Horn's confession involved a concealed stenographer hiding behind a door while an ambitious lawman lured a drunk Tom Horn to leave the territory by offering him a good job in Montana. Angus read the stenographer's version. Horn allegedly said, "It was the best shot that I ever made and the dirtiest trick I ever done." But Tom Horn's friends insist he didn't do it and never gave a confession. A lawman gone rogue made it up to advance his political career. The real question-guilt or innocence-got lost in the shuffle. Angus rides the Iron Mountain area in search for the truth. He found it when he himself had to solve another murder by ambush. He solves that murder in a way no one in the American West could imagine.