Book: Sun Going Down by Jack Todd

This is the first book in a trilogy. The second book is Come Back No More which I read a few weeks ago and very much enjoyed, not knowing it was part of a trilogy. I don't think the third book is published yet...maybe not even written yet.

Sun Going Down is a wonderfully rich and sweeping novel covering the years 1863 to 1933. It starts on the Mississippi with Ebenezer Paint and Lucien Quigley, a white man and a black man, working together on Eb's boat, up and down the Mississippi, selling and trading whatever they happened upon. But the Civil War makes river travel risky and Eb has his eyes on the newly opening western lands, so he sells his boat and heads up the Missouri. Lucien and he part ways, Lucien to look for his wife and two small children who were sold into slavery. They never meet again, but these early chapters are introduce us to the character of Eb while also acknowledging the very different perspective of a black man at this time in our history....a small separate story within the book as a whole.

Ebenezer marries and has twin sons, Ezra and Eli. This book is mostly Eli's story, but with rich detail about so much else: the prairies and lands of Nebraska, South Dakota and Wyoming, cattle drives, horse rustling, hangings, the weather, winters, spring and summer, meadowlarks, childbirth and children, good times and hard times, the atrocity of Wounded Knee, the small towns and small town diners and banks, the scourge of tuberculosis and the sanitarium in Denver. And there are the big events of history that reached into America's heartland..WWI, the depression, the lure of gold..the displacement of the Native Americans from their homelands.

"On November 8, 1932, they all gathered around the radio at the farmhouse to listen to the election results....Surely Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt would put the country right again. All those poor men out of work would find jobs, farm prices would rise, and the nation would be strong again..."

It is somehow especially gratifying to read the author's note at the end of the book: He writes, "In this case, 'based on a true story" is entirely accurate....the High Plains were not settled without bloodshed, conflict, tragedy, and sorrow; triumph for the white man meant disaster for the First Peoples; and the ascendance of powerful men with the skill, imagination, and implacable will to thrive in such a hostile setting often meant a commensurate degree of pain and suffering for those they loved most.....All the major events in his novel are based on truth, or at least that truth handed down in family lore either through the diaries and memoirs or through the stories my mother told. The truth here is in the lives of four generations of Americans over nearly a century of headlong expansion from the Mississippi River to he High Plains."

I am eagerly waiting for the final book....