Prologue – Tin Cup, Nebraska
It’s my belief that all of the greatest tales ever told have been told in saloons. It was in such smoky, heathen-filled den of iniquity that I first heard the tale of the Bone Feud. As with all great tales, it was at its core one hundred percent true. In fact, much of it has long been a matter of historical record. But tales grow in the telling, and I therefore must apologize in advance for any inaccuracies, and beg your indulgence for any romanticized embellishments. I have decided to present the story here, just as it was told to me. I find it entirely too rich and too entertaining to alter, simply to curry favor with pedants and historians.
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The saloon in question was a nameless establishment in the dilapidated mining town of Tin Cup, Nebraska. In recent years, the local mine had given up the ghost and the town seemed destined to follow. But for now, the residents of Tin Cup were holding on with stubborn tenacity, and on the afternoon of my arrival, it appeared that most of them were holding on in the local saloon.
It was a nameless place, but a place of character, where whiskey flowed, cards were dealt, and Tin Cup’s scant wealth was redistributed again and again.
It was early afternoon when I arrived. I pushed through the swinging doors, brushing the stage dust from my tweed jacket, and breathed in the atmosphere with amusement and anticipation. It was a meager crowd, a mix of the unemployed and undesirable, with a table or two of chronic gamblers testing their luck at cards. From a corner of the room, slightly out-of-tune ragtime music jangled from a well-worn player piano.
I approached the bar, where a man in an apron slumped, engrossed in a dime novel. I guessed he was in his late forties by his salt-and-pepper hair. He had the rugged, outdoorsy look of a man who’d done far more in his life than pour whiskey.
“Pardon me. Are you James Garvey?” I asked him.
“That’s what my mother called me.”
I waited, somewhat impatiently I confess, while he finished the chapter before looking up at me. When he did, he appeared a bit startled, raising his eyebrows at the sight of me: a wiry young man with ginger hair and a handlebar mustache, wire-rimmed spectacles, and—with no thanks to the frontier sun—a blooming constellation of red freckles across my nose and cheeks. His reaction made me blush deeply. I suspect I looked very much like a turnip.
I clumsily shifted the stack of notebooks and papers I carried from one arm to the other, tugged a business card from my breast pocket, and held it out to him.
“William H. Ballou, sir. I’m a reporter.”
The Bone Feud Description:
2015 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Silver Award Winner for “The Bill Fisher Award for Best First Book: Fiction.”
At the height of the American Wild West, two friends and scientific colleagues went to war. Each scrambled to out-wit and out-discover the other in a race to unearth the skeletal remains of dozens of previously undiscovered species of dinosaurs. What began with spying, bribery, and theft, quickly exploded into a bitter feud involving hired gunfighters, secret deals, and sticks of dynamite. Scientist-adventurers Edward Cope and O.C. Marsh inadvertently unleashed “dinosaur fever” across the globe, and their amazing discoveries became the subject of bidding wars by universities, museums, and even the great showman P.T. Barnum. Their story has never been told, until now.
THE BONE FEUD is an action-packed Wild West adventure based on real historic events.
Listen to the audio of The Bone Feud here.
