Hunt of a Lifetime

By John Thurmond

A man named Conner was signing people up for a wagon train going to Oregon, leaving in the spring. Conner had a flyer that made it seem like a paradise. Seth had one of the flyers and showed it to his wife, Alice, at supper one night. They talked it over for a month before they decided to go west with the wagon train. 
Seth already had a wagon and a team of young oxen that were broke to a double yoke. Seth's blacksmith tools would be loaded into the wagon, with room for supplies, bedding, and one change of clothes. He would make all the furniture they would need once they settled into their new home in Oregon. That was their plan. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Outlaws Publishing LLC
• Release date: May 8, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224748129

John Thurmond

John has since left this world for a better place.

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Copyright 2018 by John Thurmond

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is purely coincidental.

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Cover Art by Michael Thomas

Cover design by Outlaws Publishing

Published by Outlaws Publishing

April 2021

10987654321

Chapter 1

Seth O’Fallon was one of many blacksmiths in and around St. Louis, Missouri in 1867. The Civil War had ended and the whole country was full of men, and no jobs to be found. You had to watch everything you owned day and night; things seemed to just walk off by themselves.

A man named Conner was signing people up for a wagon train going to Oregon, leaving in the spring. Conner had a flyer that made it seem like a paradise. Seth had one of the flyers and showed it to his wife, Alice, at supper one night. They talked it over for a month before they decided to go west with the wagon train.

Seth already had a wagon and a team of young oxen that were broke to a double yoke. Seth’s blacksmith tools would be loaded into the wagon, with room for supplies, bedding, and one change of clothes. He would make all the furniture they would need once they settled into their new home in Oregon. That was their plan.

Neither Seth nor Alice told their fourteen year old son, Red, of their plans until it was time to go. After breakfast one morning, they told their son, who had been planning a trip of goose hunting with some other boys.

It will be quiet an adventure, going to Oregon, Seth told his son. You can hunt every day for the next two years along the trail we’re going to take. Seth made it sound like Red was going to have the hunt of a lifetime. Little did Seth know just how true that would be.

Red made himself a bow and some arrows in his father’s shop. He’d split an ash log that was over six feet long and close to an inch and a half thick. He turned the pieces he’d cut, split to a quarter inch thick, and glued them back together with some horse-hoof glue his father had made in his blacksmith’s shop. He made the arrows four feet long with metal tips and