Larry McDermott has explored many of the fabled trails, forts, and boom towns depicted in this story. As a Western enthusiast, he has participated in several old West historical adventures and escapades. Owner of two saddle mules, he has ridden high mountain wilderness and frontier trails, experiencing the American West on horseback from the Alaska-Yukon border to the depths of Palo Duro Canyon in Texas. This led him to write a novel of historical fiction inspired and loosely based on his maternal grandmother’s family emigration from eastern Tennessee across the Kansas plains.