Gustavus Adolphus: A Historical Poem and Romance of the Thirty Years’ War (1884)

The year 1867 was a turbulent one on the Plains. Union Pacific Railroad construction approached the Rocky Mountains and on the Bozeman Trail, thousands of Sioux braves besieged Fort Phil Kearny. Ellis Dodd, hunter for the U.P. Directors, and Buck Terpning, railroad worker, throw in together and head up the Bozeman with a small column of soldiers and miners, along with seductive Mary Reynolds, wife of an Illinois farmer. Ellis, tired of the corrupt barons, wants to find his Sioux wife and child and resume life with them up in the gulches. Buck gladly seeks adventure, hoping to find a wife. From the rugged plains to the peaks of the Bighorn Mountains, these unlikely partners fight Indians, outlaws, and sometimes each other in this realistic historical novel.