Her journal describes the excitement, routine, and dangers of a successful merchant's wife. On the trail for fifteen months, moving from house to house and town to town, she became adept in Spanish and the lingo of traders, and she wrote down in detail the customs and appearances of the places she went. She gave birth to her first child during the journey.

The author carries us back thirteen years before the Civil War to a time when the war's most familiar names are fighting for another cause. Thirteen years before the outbreak of the Civil War, many of the leaders on the opposite sides of that war, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, Longstreet, Jackson, and Hancock travelled to Mexico to battle the wily and enigmatic Mexican General Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana.

A fur trapper faces ruin as civilization drives game away in the Old West. But Titus Bass is an enterprising man and he retools, joining a band of horse thieves. The band skirmishes with Mexican soldiers and saves white settlers from an Indian rebellion. By the author of Ride the Moon Down