Kansas Blue — S.K. Epperson

Former Cavalry Lieutenant Austin Bourke wants to break free of his past, and leading a group of people who seek to take advantage of the Homestead Act in Kansas seems like the best way to do it, until he meets Danni Coopersand, a golden-haired woman saddled with a husband broken by the war and a half-breed Indian youth with a need for revenge against the white stepbrothers who slit his throat and left him to die. Together they travel across the plains of Kansas with a group including a Mormon family with more than one wife, one of them with a salacious past, and they encounter renegades, floods and savagery from Indians bent on retaining their way of life. At the end of the trail only the strong will survive, and in 1867 Kansas, where the horizon is endless and the sky goes on forever, the strong are damned few.