A Reluctant Desperado

Tom Ferguson was born under a dark cloud of bad luck that rained on him for seventeen years. His mother died at his birth, his father was a violent abuser, and he lost his right hand at nine years old. A Reluctant Desperado is a dark western about a young boy determined to overcome his poverty and the many challenges life has thrown at him.

The story takes place in the mid-1800s when people by the thousands left the east for the hope of a new life in the west, journeying by wagon train across a hostile land. Tom leaves his boyhood home, takes a job on a Mississippi River boat to get enough money to travel west to California, where he hopes to find peace and wealth.

On the riverboat, he meets a young girl he falls in love with, and her own misfortunes mark the beginning of his desperado days when he must destroy everyone who impedes him saving her from capture by hostile Indians, and then, by white men. The Nauvoo militia, Indians, and a host of evil men are constant barriers to his goal of getting to California. Then, when all hope of a normal life seemed lost for him, a wealthy ranch owner saw courage, intelligence, and a promising future in the young man that rescued a young desperado from a life of hopelessness.