I can't tell you how many times I'd been asked if I was ever going to write a sequel to Whispering Sun. I'd often said, "No, but I promise to write another book taking place in the 1860s..." The response was so favorable that I decided it's time to following through with my promise.
Whispering Wind is special since it takes place right where I live . . . the "Last Chance Gulch, Helena, Montana." This book also takes place at Confederate Gulch, where my husband and I actually have a gold claim and spend most our Saturdays panning for gold.
I hope you enjoy Tsopo's journey to find strength and love. Please feel free to email me and let me know what you think, rkarnopp@bresnan.net
Montana Territory 1865 – Pregnant and
alone, Tsopo, Wind, leaves her Blackfoot people to save her lifelong friend,
Kom-zit-api, An Honest Man, from untrue accusations.
Kom-zit-api finds Wind and asks her to be his sits-beside-him wife. Before she can give him an answer, he dies saving her from Crow warriors. Trapper, Jake McKinney hears her cries and finds her down on a ledge, birthing a child that has arrived too soon. Now Wind finds herself at a crossroads.
Ashamed and confused, she accepts McKinney's offer to go with him to the Big Belt Mountains, where his Confederate war buddies are prospecting for gold.
They meet brothers, Tucker and Alexander Walsh on the trail. McKinney, with his valuable bales of furs and buffalo robes, and the Walsh brothers, with their four wagons of supplies, strike a partnership. They'll start up a general store for miners on the east side of the Missouri River near Diamond City.
Wind reveals possession of a gold nugget the size of her thumb. Her father gave it to her, and she knows where in Confederate Gulch it was found. The men make her an equal partner in their business they are now calling Whispering Wind.
Nothing like her peaceful village, Wind finds herself among ramshackle clusters of tents, lean-tos, and crude log cabins. The main street is a knee-deep mud trail mixed with horse manure, lined with make-shift stores, hotels, rowdy saloons, and a single assayer's office. Wind aspires to find love and happiness where greed rules actions above common sense. Dressed like a white woman, hiding her part Blackfeet blood, she faces being one of a few women in a wild, lawless mining territory. Who can she trust? Can she survive where so many men have failed?
Summer Timber Wolf, Nii’ówa Ómahkapi'si, is disenchanted with life in general. Ashamed of being Blackfeet, yet broke and
alone, she goes to Browning, the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana she swore
she’d never return to or call home.
Angry with
her decision to quit college, her parents give her the task of caring for her
eighty-year-old grandmother, Kimi’Aki, Secret Woman. It sounds like an easy alternative to getting
a job.
By the time
Summer realizes this means she’ll be living in the mountains in the ways of the
old ones, in a tipi, with no more modern support greater than a boiling pot,
it’s too late to go back.
In this primitive
setting she realizes there’s more to being Blackfeet than just being called
Indian. Although she fights anything to
do with her ancestry, she is quickly caught up in a world of whispering spirits
and a journey that teaches we must understand and find pride in where we’ve
come from . . . in order to know where we’re going.
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