The Big Lonesome

From the New York Times bestselling author of A Fever in the Heartland, a thrilling real-life Western that is also a powerful reckoning with the drama and heroism at the final moments of the American frontier.

A story of a hard land and a most remarkable man trying to find a home under the open skies of the American Southwest, The Big Lonesome is the true tale of a frontier like no other. In the final days of the wars against the last free Native tribes, the U.S. government dispatched a corps of fierce fighters comprised of formerly enslaved men—the legendary Buffalo Soldiers. They could out-ride and out-endure nearly every other cavalry unit. And yet, they were largely despised by the people they were trying to protect. At their helm was a brilliant twenty-one-year-old, Lieutenant Henry Ossian Flipper, the first Black West Point graduate, the first Black officer to serve in the Regular U.S. Army, and now the only Black officer to command a company of soldiers. He was a scholar, a seeker, and a soldier, loyal to a country that rarely loved him back.

Born into slavery, Henry Flipper endured staggering racial prejudice as a young cadet and officer before setting out on a quest that would shape the West to this day. The Big Lonesome is the story of his life at the crossroads of legendary characters—Quanah Parker, the leader of the Comanche, with whom Flipper hunted buffalo; Victorio, the Apache chief, and Geronimo, his fellow warrior during the twilight of the Indian Wars; and a young Irish-American woman, Mollie Dwyer, whose affection for him ultimately led to his downfall. Together, they speak of a nation struggling with life-or-death contradictions at the end of Reconstruction and the dawn of the Gilded Age.

With his signature page-turning prose and breathtaking depth of research, Egan crafts a clear-eyed account of one of the most pivotal periods of American history, revisiting the land he chronicled in The Worst Hard Time, his National Book Award winning account of the Dust Bowl.