Beyond the Great Rivers

Book excerpt: Brothers William and Frank McDougal were savoring their family s newfound freedom in America after immigrating from Ireland in the mid-eighteen hundreds. That is, until the American Civil War broke and drove them away from their little patch of paradise in Hendersonville, South Carolina. After the South lost, the McDougals, along with several families in Hendersonville, loaded their lives in Conestoga wagons and headed West to escape the wrath of the then United States and the Union army. And so started their adventure in the great American frontier. The McDougals and company found themselves in the thick of the white man s struggle to win the West. Theirs is a story that puts a human face to the myth of the West, spanning the civil war period to the later part of the Indian Wars, the near extinction of the buffalo, and the legends of Buffalo Bill Cody and Wild Bill Hickok. It is one of survival, determination, sacrifice, conquest, and the struggle that gave birth to present-day America. This is the story of the Wild West s untold heroes who never made headlines but would be a shame to overlook. For without them and their sacrifices, America s western expansion might have ended as a failed attempt at Manifest Destiny.