Reading Recommendations: Killstraight, A Western Story, Johnny D. Boggs.

His Comanche name was His Arrows Fly Straight Into The Heart of His Enemies. He was the only Kwahadi Comanche who had been sent East to the Carlisle Industrial School where he was educated among 136 frightened LaKotas, Cheyennes, Kiowas, and Pawnees. It was there that his name was changed to Daniel Killstraight. When he arrived at Fort Sill by train on his way back to the Comanche reservation, Killstraight was in time to witness the public hanging of Jimmy Comes Last, who had been convicted of the brutal murders of Thomas A. Benton and his wife Karen. He had known Jimmy from the time when the comanches were still wild and Jimmy was known as Boy Who Came Last To Eat. Naseca, Jimmy's mother, also witnesses the hanging and mutilates herself in her grief. Killstraight has known Naseca virtually all his life, and he tries to comfort her. Hugh Gunter, a Cherokee lawman, has been appointed to take the body of Jimmy Comes Last back to the Comanche reservation for burial, and Naseca is to accompany him. Killstraight is invited by Gunter to join them, a good thing because Killstraight has no horse and no train can take him to the reservation.

Naseca wants Killstraight to find out for sure if her son really did the terrible things for which he was hanged. He agrees, and what makes this quest easier is Killstraight's being made a Metal Shirt. The Metal Shirts are the Comanche police, charged with pursuing and arresting Comanches who break the law, but, of course, unable to arrest any white man. Killstraight is hired as a Metal Shirt because of his ability to read, write, and speak English, valuable knowledge although there is a downside. Killstraight is actually able to understand written communications between whites, when there are those who do not want such communications to be known. For Killstraight the matter is further complicated by the fact that, based on preliminary evidence, it could well be that what to white law enforcement is unthinkable happened, and Jimmy Comes Last, who refused right up to his hanging to say anything at all, might have been innocent of the charges brought against him.

And, No One You Know, a novel, Michelle Richmond. All her life Ellie Enderlin had been known as Lila's sister. When the day Lila, a top math student at Stanford, was murdered, the shape of their family changed forever. In the aftermath of her sister's death, Ellie entrusted her most intimate feelings to a man who turned the story into a bestselling true crime book, a book that devastated her family and identified one of Lila's colleagues as the killer.

Twenty years later, Ellie is now a professional coffee buyer, an inveterate traveler who is incapable of trust. In a chance meeting with a man accused of the crime, she comes into possession of the notebook filled with mathematical equations that Lila carried everywhere. Stunned, she will return home to San Francisco to explore the mysteries of Lila's notebook and begin a search that will lead her to a centuries-old mathematical puzzle, to the motives and fate of the man who profited from their family's anguish, and to the deepest secrets even sisters keep from each other. As she connects with people whose lives unknowingly intersected with her own, Ellie will confront a series of startling revelations, from the eloquent truth of numbers to confessions of love, pain, and loss.

This one is a keeper! I Want to read everything this woman has written! I couldn't lay this one aside.

And, Historic Native Peoples of Texas, William C. Foster, foreword by Alston V. Thoms.

Several hundred tribes of Native Americans were living within or hunting and trading across the present-day borders of Texas when Cabeza de Vaca and his ship-wrecked companions washed up on a Gulf Coast beach in 1528. Over the next two centuries, as Spanish and French expeditions explored the state, they recorded detailed information about the locations and lifeways of Texas's Native peoples. Using recent translations of these expedition diaries and journals, along with discoveries from ongoing archaeological investigations, William C. Foster here assembles the most complete account ever published of Texas Native peoples during the early historic period (AD 1528 to 1722).

Foster describes the historic Native peoples of Texas by geographic regions. His chronological narrative records the interactions of Native groups with European explorers and with Native trading partners across a wide network that expanded into Louisiana, the Great Plains, New Mexico, and northern Mexico. Foster provides extensive ethnohistorical information about Texas Native peoples, as well as data on the Various regions animals, plants, and climate. Accompanying each regional account is an annotated list of named Indian tribes in that region and maps that show tribal territories and European expedition routes.

This authoritative overview of Texas's historic native peoples reveals that these groups were far more cosmopolitan than previously known. Functioning as the central link in the continent-wide circulation of trade goods and cultural elements such as religion, architecture, and lithic technology, Texas's historic Native peoples played a crucial role in connecting the native peoples of North America from the Pacific Coast to the South-East Woodlands.

See you at Rylander!