To Truckee’s Trail by Celia Hayes
In the year of 1844, a party of fifty men, women and children set out for California. They walked two thousand miles, across trackless plain and desert, fording rivers and climbing mountains.
They found a new trail through the wilderness, hoisted their wagons up a sheer cliff, were caught by the winter snows, and faced starvation, with nothing to rely on but their own courage and trust in each other.
These are their stories; the doctor-diarist and party co-leader, the old mountain man who guided them, the feisty woman with her brood of children who means to rejoin her husband in California, the taciturn wagon master… all inexorably drawn to Truckee’s Trail!
To Truckee’s Trail is also available in a Kindle edition and in paperback from Booklocker and through Amazon.com. You can read it on The Daily Novel here.
Celia Hayes earned a degree in English Literature (California State University Northridge, 1976) before an un-slaked thirst for adventure and foreign travel led her to enlist in the United States Air Force. She trained as a radio and television broadcast technician, and served for twenty years in places as various as Greece, Spain, Japan, Korea, Greenland, and Ogden, Utah, in a wide assortment of duties and pleasures that included midnight alt-rock DJ, TV news anchor, video-production librarian, radio and television writer and producer, production manager, base tour guide, and on one colorful occasion driver of a bright orange Volvo sedan across Western Europe from Athens to Zaragoza, Spain, accompanied only by a small and cranky child.
In 2002, she became a regular contributor to the military-oriented weblog, “Sgt. Stryker’s Daily Brief” (now “The Daily Brief”) writing essays and commentary on matters historical, personal, political, cultural, literary, and military under the “nom du blog” of “Sgt. Mom.” Besides To Truckee’s Trail she is the author of a memoir, and The Adelsverein Trilogy, a series of historical novels about the German settlements in the 19th century Texas Hill country. She is currently working on another novel, about the early days of Texas. She is also a founding member of the Independent Authors Guild, and serves as their website manager. Her website is www.celiahayes.com.
