by Untamed
Instead, she wanted to honor the man who’d been as close as a brother to Zach. She couldn’t have chosen a more direct means of telling him she’d put her past behind her and turned her face to the future. A future they’d build together.
“Nathaniel Morgan,” he said with a slow grin. “I think that’s a fine name. Let’s hope he lives up to it.”
Author’s Note
While Barbara and Zach Morgan are figments of my admittedly active imagination, the historical events referenced in this book are very real.
In 1836, President Andrew Jackson ordered the army to enforce the provisions of the Indian Removal Act. Those Native Americans who refused to voluntarily relocate were forced from their homes at bayonet point, incarcerated in hastily erected stockades, and eventually moved West. More than four thousand Cherokee died during the infamous march that became known as the Trail of Tears.
Fort Gibson served as the terminus of that exodus. For many years, it was also the primary outpost in Indian Country, later known as Oklahoma Indian Territory. The name Oklahoma first appeared in an 1866 treaty with the Choctaw tribe. Coined by a Native American missionary, the term is a combination of two Choctaw words: okla, meaning people, and humma, meaning red.
You might also be interested to know Britain continued to use transportation and/or confinement to hulks to relieve overcrowded prison conditions as late as 1867. Overall, more than two hundred thousand convicts were transported to the Americas, Bermuda and the penal colonies of Australia. Many of the convicts who survived eventually flourished in their new lives.
Some weren’t as fortunate. Like the heroine of the next book in this series, they ended their days in prison or mounted the steps of the gallows. Watch for She Shot Him Dead, coming from MIRA in 2005, set during the wild-and-woolly outlaw days of Oklahoma Indian Territory.
ISBN: 978-1-4603-0783-0
UNTAMED
Copyright © 2004 by Merline Lovelace.
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All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
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