Showing results by author "Cynthia Haseloff" in All Categories

Superstition, mystery, and murder also have a niche in western writing with this story by Cynthia Haselhoff.

Haseloff's characters embody the fundamental values - honor, duty, courage, and family - that prevailed on the American frontier and were instilled in the young Haseloff by her own "heroes", her mother and her grandmother. Her stories, in a sense, dramatize how these values endure when challenged by the adversities and cruelties of frontier existence.  

In 1864, the frontier cavalry had been withdrawn to fight in the War Between the States, and the able-bodied men had enlisted to join the cause, leaving the families in the Brazos River valley very much on their own...and nearly defenseless. The Comanches and the Kiowas decided this was the perfect time to rid their land forever of the invaders who had threatened their very existence. 

Abandoned, starving and almost out of food, Annie and her child meet the "Preacher." He's killed many times, he's hungry, and he's not leaving.

When Kiowa war chief, Santana, boasted that he had led a war party against a wagon train of freighters, he set the stage for his arrest. The war party had robbed, tortured and mutilated members of the wagon train, and now the Kiowa chiefs were to be tried in a Texas court. The case seemed open and shut, but attorney Joe Woolfolk made it clear that the U.S. would have to prove its charge without using Santanas boastful self-incrimination.

A 30-something rancher, Adrienne Chastain, both a mother and a grandmother, sees her daughter and one of her granddaughters killed in an Indian raid. She, her young son, and two other granddaughters are captured. Her son is subsequently killed by the Kiowa war chief Satanta, and one of the granddaughters is taken away by a band of Comanches, the Kiowa's allies.