Overview

In the autumn of 1881, Elias Harlan rides into Blackfeet country with one good horse and a bill of sale for land that has belonged to other people for ten thousand years. Two winters later, the buffalo are gone and the people who depended on them are starving in their lodges. Between those two moments lies a country breaking. Elias learns the work of the high plains-the spring calving, the winter grass, the arithmetic of a herd that survives or doesn't. He takes a grulla mare from a Lakota man at Fort Buford and calls her Biter. He watches the Blackfeet of the agency die that winter at a rate of two and three a day, and learns that watching is also a kind of choice. Told in the spare, unsparing prose of American literary realism, The Rancher is the story of a man who came west looking for a beginning and arrived in time for the end-and of the people whose ending it was. For readers of Paulette Jiles, James Welch, Guy Vanderhaeghe, and Kent Haruf.

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William Mann is the author of The Long Reckoning, a literary historical fiction series set in the American West between 1840 and 1890. The Rancher, Book One, follows the rancher Elias Harlan into Blackfeet country in the years of the Starvation Winter of 1883-84.William and his wife Chris live and travel full-time in an RV with their dogs, Sadie and Bronn. Each novel in the series is researched on the ground-the ridges, rivers, reservations, and trading posts where the historical events actually occurred.Empty Ground, Book Two, follows the Irish immigrant Declan Shea across thirty-five years of the buffalo hunt. The Long Way Home, Book Three, follows the Northern Cheyenne exodus of 1878-79. Book Four is underway.

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