The Poacher's Daughter
—Winner of the 2015 Wrangler Award
—National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum
—Finalist for the Western Writers of America Spur Award
The Poacher's Daughter is an extraordinary story of betrayal and redemption, set within an uncompromising landscape of raw brutality and unimaginable beauty. -- In 1885 young Rose Edwards is widowed by Montana vigilantes who hang her husband for an alleged theft, then burn her Yellowstone Valley cabin to the ground as a warning for her and others of her kind to quit the territory. Penniless and illiterate, yet fiercely independent, Rose begins a two-year odyssey to revisit the land of her childhood, a land she once traveled with her father, an itinerant robe trader among the Assiniboines and Blackfeet. But the old ways of the hunter and trapper are disappearing as Europeans flood the ranges with vast herds of cattle. With an aging roan gelding as her closest friend, Rose becomes a reluctant hero of an indigenous population as she stubbornly pushes back against the invading aristocracy.
Rose is a beautiful composite of frontier women, some famous, some not; Zimmer’s great strength is that he doesn’t make his heroine anything other than an ordinary, decent woman who never had any luck. She falls so low, she has nothing to lose and can become a pure spirit, and an avenger of the weak. Think of Luke Short for action and Ernest Haycox for his sweeping style. All westerns should be this good.
—Booklist - Starred Review
''Zimmer's tale of the unconventional Rose of Yellowstone is plainly and unemotionally told . . . Readers of Westerns will welcome a female character who can take the bull by the horns.
—Library Journal
The storyline is exceptional and well-thought-out, providing readers with a fun novel that will have them hoping the main character, Rose Edwards, will succeed against difficult and life-threatening obstacles ... Highly recommended.
—Historical Novel Society
-Wrangler and Spur Winner-
Michael Zimmer
