Wheels on the Bozeman Trail
A Novel of the Powder River Freighters

About this book:

The year is 1866, and the Civil War may be over, but the deadliest fight for the West is just beginning. Caleb Finch is a veteran bullwhacker who knows the math of survival: twelve oxen, four tons of freight, and one eighteen-foot lash to keep the whole precarious engine moving toward the Powder River. When his hard-driving Scots wagon master diverts the train north from Fort Laramie—straight into the hunting grounds of Red Cloud and his Lakota warriors—the forty-dollar-a-month haul becomes a sixty-dollar gamble with death. Outgunned, outnumbered, and saddled with greenhorns who think a Spencer carbine makes them soldiers, Caleb must turn a freight train into a fortress on wheels.

From the alkali flats of Nebraska to the smoke-choked valleys of Crazy Woman Creek, *Wheels on the Bozeman Trail* puts you in the dust beside the iron tires and rattling chains. Feel the weight of the yoke, the sting of the whip, and the heat of a fire fight where the enemy knows every draw and coulee. This is not the West of legend—this is the West of sweat, leverage, and brutal logistics, where a broken axle is a death sentence and the only law is the Bullwhacker's Creed: keep the wagons rolling.

Gritty, immersive, and thunderous with historical detail, this is the great freighting novel the frontier deserves. If you crave the raw machinery of Manifest Destiny—the men, the beasts, and the bloody geometry of the Bozeman Road—hook up your team and ride drag with Caleb Finch. The trail is open, the grass is burning, and the last wagon home has not yet been written.