Savage Country
A Novel
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3.8 • 16 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
"The year was 1873 and all about was the evidence of boom and bust, shattered dreams, foolish ambition, depredation, shame, greed, and cruelty . . ."
Onto this broken Western stage rides Michael Coughlin, a Civil War veteran with an enigmatic past, come to town to settle his dead brother's debt. Together with his widowed sister-in-law, Elizabeth, bankrupted by her husband's folly and death, they embark on a massive, and hugely dangerous, buffalo hunt. Elizabeth hopes to salvage something of her former life and the lives of the hired men and their families who now depend on her; the buffalo hunt that her husband had planned, she now realizes, was his last hope for saving the land.
Elizabeth and Michael plunge south across the aptly named "dead line" demarcating Indian Territory from their home state of Kansas. Nothing could have prepared them for the dangers: rattlesnakes, rabies, wildfire, lightning strikes, blue northers, flash floods—and human treachery. With the Comanche in winter quarters, Elizabeth and Michael are on borrowed time, and the cruel work of harvesting the buffalo is unraveling their souls.
Bracing, direct, and quintessentially American, Olmstead's gripping narrative follows that infamous hunt, which drove the buffalo to near extinction. Savage Country is the story of a moment in our history in which mass destruction of an animal population was seen as a road to economic salvation. But it's also the intimate story of how that hunt changed Michael and Elizabeth forever.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hunters, skinners, and teamsters slaughter herds of buffalo on the Old West plains of 1873 in Olmstead's ninth novel, in an orgy of killing for profit on a grand and wasteful scale. Olmstead (Coal Black Horse) presents a grim, gruesome tale of buffalo hunting and harsh, deadly frontier life. Elizabeth Coughlin, recently widowed, is set to lose her ranch to a cheating banker named Whitechurch. Desperate to pay off her debt, she and her brother-in-law Michael organize a large hunting party to go into Comanche territory to find the last massive herd of buffalo, which have been hunted nearly to extinction. Despite a warning that Whitechurch will try to kill them, Michael and Elizabeth lead the party to the hunting grounds, enduring prairie fires, floods, heat, cold, fatigue, injuries, illness, gory evidence of Comanche atrocities, and the ever-present danger of ambush by Whitechurch's gunmen. Michael is a stone-cold killer, patient advisor, and teacher of fieldcraft, and Elizabeth shows remarkable courage, judgment, and strength of character as the leader of the unwashed, profane, rough men in the bloody business of killing and skinning a thousand buffalo a day when not killing each other. This is a powerful depiction of the brutality of the Old West, where life was cheap and easily taken.
