more so the character of those sturdy, austere folk who settled the Great Plains. From my father I believe I inherited the virtue of hard work and perseverance. And from my mother, besides her abiding love and reverence for the land, I have inherited a stamina to endure all the travesty that life can throw at simple folk. Those traits she has given me, along with a belief in the Almighty—the self-same belief that helped those hardy settlers endure through hailstorms and locust plagues, drought and barrel-bottom crop prices.
Brought up in the fifties during the era of Saturday matinees and some twenty hours of prime-time westerns on those small boxes we fondly called TV, early on I found myself bitten by the seductive lure of the West. Yet, it was not until 1965 during my freshman year in college in Oklahoma where I was studying to become a history teacher that I was finally able to separate the History of the West from the
You would be hard pressed to find a man happier than I—still teaching as I am thousands of readers outside the confines of the classroom about a magical epoch of expansion that roared rowdy and rambunctious across the plains and mountains of our Western frontier. A man is a success when he can put food on his family’s table doing what he loves most to do.
Over the years I’ve been cursed with the itchiest of feet, moving on frequently as did the rounders and roamers of this mountain West more than a hundred-odd years before me. My wife Rhonda wants to stay put for awhile, here in Billings along the Yellowstone, under the sun hung in that Big Sky, while we raise our two children, son Noah and daughter Erinn.
There’ll be time enough to move on, time enough for me to see what’s over the next hill. Time enough still to follow the seductive lure of tomorrow and the next valley across the years to come …
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TERRY C. JOHNSTON was born on the plains of Kansas and has immersed himself in the history of the early West. His first novel,
