Coldiron

M. Parker F.

Description

Thunder of Cannon tells the magnificent saga of the battle for New Orleans, and of those who fought with honor and courage - in the heart of a nation cut in two by civil war. The time is April 1862 during the Civil War with the Union Navy pounding with their powerful cannons at the gates of New Orleans. The time had come for the city to choose sides and go to war.From the narrow streets of the French Quarter to wind swept Lake Pontchartrain and the vast bayou country, the battle of New Orleans plunges men and women into chaos, tragedy, and a struggle for survival and revenge. Luke Coldiron came to New Orleans with 250 horses from the New Mexico Territory to sell to the Confederate forces. He found a city overrun by Union forces, and a beautiful woman who would draw him into her need for revenge against a renegade U.S. marine commander and his private band of thugs and murderers. Susan Dauphin, the daughter of a wealthy plantation owner, watched her world go up in smoke. Driven to fury from and act of treachery and murder, she pits herself into a life or death struggle against the marauding Union marines. She would earn one man's hatred, and another's undying love.Marine Captain Rawls landed in New Orleans from Admiral Farragut's Navy flotilla. Ripping into the South's heartland, he broke the Confederate hold on the city, and began a dirty private war of murder and thievery.Panther, the Chickasaw Indian had run into the swamps and hid when his people were forcibly removed from their homeland and taken to the Oklahoma Territory. Now he fights the invaders to restore his honor as a warrior.

Informations

• Publié par: F. M. Parker
• Date de parution: 21 janvier 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781908400536
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Coldiron Thunder of Cannon
F. M Parker
The Civil War rolled across a nation. Now, New Orleans would feel the storm.
Thunder of Cannon tells the magnificent saga of the battle for New Orleans, and of those who fought with honor and courage - in the heart of a nation cut in two by civil war.
The time is April 1862 during the Civil War with the Union Navy pounding with their powerful cannons at the gates of New Orleans. The time had come for the city to choose sides and go to war.
From the narrow streets of the French Quarter to wind swept Lake Pontchartrain and the vast bayou country, the battle of New Orleans plunges men and women into chaos, tragedy, and a struggle for survival and revenge.
Luke Coldiron came to New Orleans with 250 horses from the New Mexico Territory to sell to the Confederate forces. He found a city overrun by Union forces, and a beautiful woman who would draw him into her need for revenge against a renegade U.S. marine commander and his private band of thugs and murderers.
Susan Dauphin, the daughter of a wealthy plantation owner, watched her world go up in smoke. Driven to fury from and act of treachery and murder, she pits herself into a life or death struggle against the marauding Union marines. She would earn one man s hatred, and another s undying love.
Marine Captain Rawls landed in New Orleans from Admiral Farragut s Navy flotilla. Ripping into the South s heartland, he broke the Confederate hold on the city, and began a dirty private war of murder and thievery.
Panther, the Chickasaw Indian had run into the swamps and hid when his people were forcibly removed from their homeland and taken to the Oklahoma Territory. Now he fights the invaders to restore his honor as a warrior.
About the Author

F. M. PARKER has worked as a sheepherder, lumberman, sailor, geologist, and as a manager of wild horses, buffalo, and livestock grazing. For several years he was the manager of five million acres of public domain land in eastern Oregon.
His highly acclaimed novels include Skinner, Coldiron, The Searcher, Shadow of the Wolf, The Shanghaiers, The Highbinders, The Far Battleground, The Shadow Man, and The Slavers.
For more details visit www.fearlparker.com
SUPERBLY WRITTEN AND DETAILED... PARKER BRINGS THE WEST TO LIFE. Publishers Weekly
ABSORBING...SWIFTLY PACED, FILLED WITH ACTION! Library Journal
PARKER ALWAYS PRESENTS A LIVELY, CLOSELY PLOTTED STORY. Bookmarks
REFRESHING, COMBINES A GOOD STORY WITH FIRST-HAND KNOWLEDGE. University of Arizona Library
RICH, REWARDING... DESERVES A WIDE GENERAL READERSHIP. Booklist
Also by F.M. Parker
Novels
The Highwayman Wife Stealer Winter Woman The Assassins Girl in Falling Snow The Predators The Far Battleground Coldiron - Judge and Executioner Coldiron - Shadow of the Wolf Coldiron - The Shanghaiers Coldiron - Thunder of Cannon The Searcher The Seeker The Highbinders The Shadow Man The Slavers Nighthawk Skinner Soldiers of Conquest
Screenplays
Women for Zion Firefly Catcher
Table of Contents
Coldiron - Thunder of Cannon
About the Author
Also by F.M. Parker
YOUR FATHER IS DEAD.
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
Thirty-four
Thirty-five
Author s Notes
Copyright Page
YOUR FATHER IS DEAD.
How? Where did it happen? Susan Dauphin asked as tears began to well up in her eyes.
At your home, Luke Coldiron said. Raiders were attacking the house when your father and I got there. Your father charged them firing his pistol. They shot him.
They all escaped?
We killed three of them. Three got away. They ve burned your home. Your slaves and I tried to put the fires out, but it had too much of a start before we could get to it. We were able to save a few things.
Susan turned away. And what of your horses? Were you paid?
The raiders had blasted the safe open. All the money was gone. Also a second band of men killed the guards at the cavalry camp and stole all the horses. Both attacks were well planned and coordinated.
A terrible hate swept over Susan and her hands clenched at her sides as the need for vengeance rose black and ugly within her. Union men had slain her father and destroyed her home. They would pay a horrible price for that.
Damn them all to hell!
Prologue
The Creation of the Mississippi River
The drifting snow of the white ice desert of the great glacier was less hospitable than the drifting sands of the hottest desert.
For tens of thousands of years the water of the oceans had been sucked up by the winds of the earth and flung down as snow onto the breast of the continent. The snow turned to ice, more than two million cubic miles of it smothering the land. The level of the oceans dropped two hundred feet.
Piled nearly two miles thick in its central dome, the ice became plastic under its own crushing weight. Mobile now, the ice flowed outward to cover two-thirds of the land surface, and extended far out into the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans. The glacier drowned mountains six thousand feet tall, obliterated two mighty rivers-one flowing east and another north-and beheaded a third river that went off to the south. Even the strong rock crust of the planet was depressed two thousand feet.
Millennium after millennium passed as the glacier held the continent captive. Powerful winds blew constantly off the huge ice field, stirring raging blizzards in summer as well as winter. The beheaded, south-flowing river was often frozen solid to its rocky bottom.
The shifting balance of heat and cold on the earth tilted to the warm side. The quantity of ice flowing to the periphery of the glacier became equal to that which was melting. The glacier halted its advance across the continent and stood and did battle with the sun for thousands of years.
The glacier lost the battle and surrendered to the sun. In six thousand years the front of the ice retreated five hundred miles.
A multitude of streams of water rushed away from the seventeen hundred miles of melting glacier terminus, spreading like a tangled skein of blue-green silk through rock and sand moraines. The giant rivers that had been overrun by the ice flowed strongly again. They fought each other for mastery of the continent s broad watershed.
Once, an arm of the thick ice blocked the east river for eight thousand years and created a gigantic lake. To the west, large depressions were uncovered by the retreating glacier. Ice melt poured into the deep cavities to form a series of mighty lakes, the ancestors of the Great Lakes of today.
The land surface began to rebound from the depressed level to which the glacier had crushed it. The bottoms of the lakes rose. At times the high walls of the lakes were breached, and a flood of unimaginable quantity spilled out. Most of the water poured into the river flowing south, and it became the mightiest river on the planet.
The braided network of the upper reaches of the south river finally coalesced downstream into one tremendous channel several miles wide and hundreds of feet deep. The channel ran brimful of swift water straining to return to the sea.
For long distances behind the retreating glacier, the land lay barren and abandoned by all the plants and animals. Choking dust storms raged, swirling away, carrying the fine loess soil two miles into the air and many hundreds of miles beyond its source. The sun was obscured for months. In the darkness, massive sand dunes fifty feet tall and miles long were birthed.
The south river cared nothing about the darkness but hurried onward, pulled relentlessly by the implacable gravity of the planet. It dumped its titanic load of sand and silt into the Gulf of Mexico. A delta of massive proportions grew swiftly, now below sea level, now above.
The lusty river full of tumbling, churning water refused to be held to one channel and it frequently shifted its huge, meandering body into new courses. It flung its mouth from side to side, sometimes tens of miles apart in a day, and spewed out its load of continental debris-first here and then there. Often the delta expanded thousands of feet in a year, until it was scores of miles wide and extended ten times that far into the Gulf. The river changed the very size and shape of the continent.
The glacier died. The river shrank. Yet it was still a great stream, and near its mouth was half a mile wide and two hundred and fifty feet deep. For ten thousand years the river flowed thus.
Natural levees formed on the banks of the river. Each time the stream poured over its banks, the current slowed at the margin of the channel and dropped its load of fine silt. Embankments, levees, were thus built. The river in normal flow was confined within these impervious banks of clay. Outside the levees, and lying below the level of the river, was a region of extensive swamps and lakes, a labyrinth of water and land.
At times deep crevasses broke the levees and the river plunged through, flooding the land for vast distances and holding it in a watery prison for weeks. The land animals drowned.
Then one year white men found the river. They traveled its length and named it Mississippi from the name the Indians gave it, misi-great and sipi-water. In their foolhardy, reckless way, the white men began to build a town in the mud flats lying twice the height of a tall man below the level of the river. Only a fragile levee protected the town, call New Orleans, from the gargantuan destructive powers of the river.
As was its habit, the river often rampaged through the town for the presence of the white men did not prevent the levees from failing.
One
April 23, 1862. Fort Jackson, near the mouth of the Mississippi River.
The 8-inch C