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Carol Buchanan

Carol Buchanan Books
Owner
Kalispell, MT

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Carol Buchanan writes in the frontier between fiction and history. Her first four novels – God’s Thunderbolt, The Devil in the Bottle, Gold Under Ice, and The Ghost at Beaverhead Rock – nailed the story of the Stark-McDowell family as tight to Montana's Vigilante history as possible. Her current project tells the story of a widowed mother, her two young sons, and her feeble younger brother who escape the slums of St. Louis in 1900 to homestead in eastern Montana. There they are caught up in forces of history that converge to begin changing Montana from Old West to New West. The younger son, age 7, gets the drop on an outlaw evading the posse after robbing the Great Northern passenger train #3. The family becomes the center of a dispute between sheepmen and cattle barons over fencing the open range, and become embroiled in a robbery at the Rulby Gulch gold mine in Zortman.
Carol has written documentation of these events handed down from her father (the younger son), but for much of the in encounters has come down family whose decisions test them in ways they never imagined. When lawyer Daniel Stark joins the Vigilance Committee he commits acts he cannot forgive himself for. When Martha McDowell’s brutal husband deserts her, she agrees to live with Dan though she fears McDowell’s return. Yet a greater danger arises when vigilantes accuse Dan of his murder.


Carol has a PhD in English Lit/History. She writes and teaches self-publishing and Montana’s Vigilante History at Flathead Valley Community College. She lives in Kalispell with her husband, Richard, who owns Byte Savvy Computing Services. She enjoys walking long distances, reading, and caring for three 99-year-old peonies she rescued from her grandmother’s grave.