The quickest way to get from eastern Kansas to Denver in 1867, was The Smoky Hill Trail. It was 500 miles of open prairie where stage coaches and freight wagons could be high and dry one day and swimming in mud the next. Five hundred miles of surprise snowstorms, oppressive heat, violent thunderstorms, choking dust, and if Mother Nature's threats weren't enough, there were vast herds of bison covering a land that was the ancestral home Cheyennes and Arapahoes bent on securing their native homeland from the invading whites. Soldiers of the U.S. Army at Fort Hays, Kansas, were the only protection for freighters, stagecoach passengers, and gold seekers looking for a new way of life in the mineral-rich Rocky Mountains. It was a dangerous time and the Smoky Hill Trail was marked by anonymous graves, blood-soaked wagon tracks, and stories of legend. The book centers on Fort Hays, a sprawling military post in northwest Kansas, and Sergeant Major Thomas Barrett, the senior ranking enlisted man in the 18th U.S. Infantry Regiment in 1888. It is through his eyes and memories that the reader will be transported back to the dangerous, exciting, and memorable times when the Smoky Hill Trail was travelled by the brave-hearted European immigrants and equally brave-hearted Native Americans. "War Clouds on the High Plains" is the first in a series of books chronicling the "Tales of the Sergeant Major."
