Ridgeline

Wyoming Territory, 1866. Colonel Henry B. Carrington brings the 18th Infantry into the Powder River country to build forts protecting the Bozeman Trail, a route crossing the hunting grounds of the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Northern Arapaho. Red Cloud assembles resistance while Crazy Horse tests the soldiers through raids and decoys; within Fort Phil Kearny, veterans divided by the Civil War struggle with isolation, discipline and competing ideas of command.

The novel moves among Native leaders, soldiers, scouts and army families as the conflict closes around the Fetterman Fight of 21 December 1866. Rather than presenting a simple last stand, Punke shows the battle as the result of territorial invasion, strategic adaptation and institutional failure. Its multiple viewpoints make the book a reconstruction of Red Cloud’s War and a study of how conquest is justified, resisted and remembered.