Red River Crossing

Martin Wallace had bucked the tiger, seen the elephant, fought with Nathan Forrest Bedford, battled Quanah Parker and his Comanches, skinned three thousand buffalo, and slipped unseen through Indian Territory, all with no more than a scratch or bad cold. He was heading home to Injun Bayou on the Sabine River carrying $6,000 in gold.

If he’d known that he was going to be caught up in a flood, lose the gold, bust an arm, live with a crazy woman and her three daughters, run a supply station for trail drives up the Chisholm Trail, battle renegade Indians, search centipede-infested caves for one sister, and scour the Indian Territory for another, then maybe he would have taken a different trail back to East Texas.

But he didn’t, and because he didn’t, his life was never the same and neither were the lives of the four women.

Kent Conwell grew up in the wide-open Texas Panhandle in the town of Wheeler, population 848. His love of the West came naturally, for his grandfather had run away from his Tennessee home when he was 14. He bullwhacked his way to the Panhandle where he later met his future wife who had traveled from Illinois to Texas in a covered wagon.

After moving to Fort Worth where Kent was more at home at the stockyards than school, he earned a B.S. and began teaching. Later, he moved to Port Neches where he acquired a M.Ed and a Ph.D. A successful educator, his love for writing about the West has never waned for that was the one period unique to American history. He has won awards for short stories, screenplays, mysteries, and westerns.

Red River Crossing is Kent's twentieth western for Avalon.