The Claim
About
He survived Gettysburg. Holding on to his great-grandfather's land may take more from him than the war did.
Purchase McLennan comes home from the Civil War to the one inheritance his family has never had to defend: a stone buffalo carved out of a rock monolith on the Dakota grass, raised by a great-grandfather he never knew, on land that nobody else wanted.
Nobody else wanted it. Now everybody does.
The railroads are pushing west. The herds are being shot out by the trainload. Emigrants arrive in their thousands to claim ground that was Native territory a season ago. And Quintus Bellow, a newspaperman, and Edison Lomax, a Chicago speculator, have decided the McLennan rock will be theirs.
Purchase has a wife, a claim he cannot afford to lose, and no appetite left for violence.
He is going to need one.
The third novel in Monuments of Grass, a five-book saga tracing America from the colonial frontier to the present day. For readers of James Michener, Edward Rutherfurd and Ken Follett.