The Ghost Road - The Long Reckoning, #4

The Ghost Road is the fourth novel in William Mann's The Long Reckoning, a literary historical series tracing the destruction of the Native nations of the American West across the nineteenth century.

It is 1890. Billy Lee Grogan is sixty-eight years old, a retired Army sergeant living quietly in the Davis Mountains of West Texas with his horse, his chickens, and a goat he cannot outwit. He has given the Army forty-five years. He does not intend to give them anything more.

But the Army has his name on a list, and a religious movement is spreading across the West. A Paiute man in Nevada - Wovoka, called Jack Wilson by the whites - has had a vision. He is teaching his people to dance. The dance is crossing the mountains, moving onto the plains, reaching the Sioux in the Dakotas, and the Army wants to know what it means before it has to find out the hard way.

Billy Lee rides to Nevada.

Moving between 1890 and the long arc of Billy Lee's life - the Cherokee removal of 1838, the siege of Vera Cruz, the burning of Palo Duro Canyon - The Ghost Road is a novel about what a man carries when he has spent a lifetime doing the work of an empire he no longer believes in. It is also the story of In-nah-la, a Cherokee girl who walks the Trail of Tears as a child and survives into a life built from what could not be taken. And it is the story of Wovoka himself, a man who was given a message of peace and watched the world make something else of it.

Spare, morally serious, and deeply researched, The Ghost Road is literary historical fiction in the tradition of Wallace Stegner and Cormac McCarthy - a novel about the American West as it actually was, and what that cost.