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11/07. 288 pages.
0896726177
978-0-89672-617-8

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Trail of the Red Butterfly

By Karl H. Schlesier

While ascending the Missouri in 1804, Lewis and Clark met trader Jean Valle, who had wintered in Cheyenne camps near the Black Hills and who recounted extensive horse-raiding upon Spanish settlements. Trail of the Red Butterfly is the first novel to depict such a raid through Cheyenne eyes.

Cheyenne Kit Fox headman Stone learns that his twin, Whirlwind, has gone missing on an 1807 foray into northeastern New Spain. Gathering an eclectic party of Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Gataka warriors, women and children, and a wolf dog, Stone sets out from his camp on the Upper Republican River, present-day eastern Colorado. Stone’s relentless search takes his party across the High Plains of Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas; through the Davis and Chisos mountains; into the Bolsón de Mapimí; and past the great laguna to the Nazas River, where finally he picks up his brother’s trail. With the help of Maria, a Hiaqui woman whose freedom they buy, the party doggedly follows the trail in hostile country, through towns and ranches to dramatic conclusion on the Camino Real. Relying on Juan Pedro Walker’s 1805 map and a distinguished career in anthropological research, Karl Schlesier conjures a convincing journey into the unknown, driven in part by the lure of plunder and distant places, but ultimately sustained by a brother’s determination to recover his other half.


“Imagine your twin captured by technologically superior extraterrestrials. Imagine that you must slip into their world to effect his rescue. For the early nineteenth-century Cheyenne and Kiowa who must penetrate New Spain in this astounding novel, the task seems no less overwhelming or alien. Schlesier delivers immaculate historic and cultural accuracy with riveting suspense.”--J. M. Hayes, author of The Grey Pilgrim and the Mad Dog & Englishman mysteries

Karl H. Schlesier taught anthropology at the universities of Wichita State and Kansas for thirty years. His fieldwork has taken him from the central Pyrenees of France to the arctic slopes of northern Alaska and twice into federal court as an expert witness for the Cheyenne Nation. Among his other books are Plains Indians, A.D. 500-1500: The Archaeological Past of Historic Groups and the novel Josanie’s War.