Blood to Rubies is the towering saga of injustice, love, and redemption. A young frontier photographer goes West to escape the Civil War draft and settles in the Bitterroot Mountains, ancestral home of the Nez Perce Indians. He becomes obsessed with a young Irish woman he spies swimming nude in a mountain lake, an obsession that captivates him from afar. He comes to admire the area Nez Perce and photographs the young Chief Joseph and a woman warrior named Flying Horse (based on a real woman never written about). Their stories tangle in a ruthless convergence of fates. As he witnesses the desperate struggle of Chief Joseph and Flying Horse to save their people and their harrowing 1,500-mile exodus to the Canadian border–"the medicine line"–to freedom, fighting the US military's best generals all the way, he feels complicit in their demise and is desperate to redeem himself.

The FOREWORD is written by world-renown Nez Perce historian, Allen V. Pinkham, Sr., Chair of the Nez Perce Tribe, Founding Board Member of Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, and descendant of Chief Joseph, who heroically and heartbreakingly led his people in their fight for freedom, as well as descendant of Chief Red Grizzly Bear, who saved Lewis and Clark from starving to death and showed them the way to the Northwest Passage, thereby altering American history forever.

For more information or to contact the author, go to her website.

Or her popular historical blog NotesfromtheFrontier.

Special thanks to the Nez Perce Language Program for pronunciation guidance for the many Nimiipuu words in the narration of Blood to Rubies.