We traveled many days together, my beautiful White Dove and I. That journey was the greatest time of my life, and Elsie and I were deep in love long before we crested the hills above the valley where my people made their winter camp. "We are home, Elsie," I said as I gazed out at the many conical tents that dotted the land below. Lazy trails of smoke rose from a hundred fires, and I could see the men and women the tribe w...

It was only when I watched Red Elk turn his back to me and began to ride off that I understood. He was making me decide if I wanted to go with him or to return to my own kind. But they weren't my own kind, were they? I'm not American, and I couldn't trust them. For all I know they were no different than the savages who killed my husband, and would do awful things to me. At least Red Elk had shown he wasn't going to hurt m...

Travis Michael Dillon had seen enough. He had seen enough bloodshed. He had seen enough suffering. He had seen enough of the war. So in the spring of 1866, he decided to do something about it. The War Between the States had just ended and while President Lincoln had worked to heal the country and reunite it once again prior to his assassination, Travis wanted to get as far away from it as he possibly could. The war had ra...

I spent the warm season hunting beaver along the shores of the great river. The hunt was good, but too many days had passed and each one was now shorter than the last. Cold winds were already blowing from the North and soon the white snows would be falling from the sky. I knew that if I were to return to my home fires before thick drifts filled the land, I would be forced to cut through the rolling hills of the Arapaho. I...

As the traffic in which her rental car was mired inched forward and stopped once again, Sally sighed in frustration, tapping her nails impatiently upon the rim of the steering wheel. She looked at the stalled lanes of traffic on either side of her, which would creep ahead or slowly fall behind as the glacier of cars crawled forward along the six northbound lanes of the west Beltway. So far, America seemed like one big tra...

Rachel checked her coupons and let out a sigh. At least turkey is still cheap. I’ll be eating it until New Years, though. As if the economy wasn’t tough enough, she was still trying to recover from her divorce a year earlier. Fortunately, she hadn’t given in to her ex-husband’s near demands to quit her job. If not for that, she might very well be living in a homeless shelter instead of squeaking by to rent her modest home...