Finding Billy Battles: An Account of Peril, Transgression and Redemption

Western Kansas, 1860. Billy Battles is born on a remote homestead just off the storied Santa Fe Trail. More than one hundred years later, a great-grandson inherits two trunks filled with Billy’s personal effects. In those trunks are several secret journals that reveal an astonishing life of adventure and violence that until now was obscured by the haze of time and Billy’s desire for secrecy. The journals tell of a man both haunted and hunted, who in a desperate search for peace and redemption, journeys far from the untamed American West to the Far East, South America, and Europe. In amazing detail, they describe Billy’s interaction with a wide assortment of men and women–some legendary, a few iniquitous, and many lost to history. They also recount his participation in such cataclysmic events as the Spanish American War, turmoil in French Indochina, and violent revolutions in Mexico and South America. Complying with Billy’s last request, the great-grandson assembles the journals into a compelling trilogy that reveals a man often trapped and overwhelmed by circumstances beyond his control, but who nevertheless manages to persevere for ten decades.

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