Jim Vesely was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. He and his wife, Mary, presently live in the small village of Corrales, New Mexico. The author is a member of the Western Writers of America.

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The sprawling saga of a Czech-American family's determined struggle and unforgettable odyssey . . . from the hunger and hardship of Eastern Europe, across the cold and gray Atlantic in steerage, and on into America's growing cities and farms. An immigrant story of turmoil, heartbreak and humor . . . peopled with characters as vivid and colorful as the rich American landscape of the last hundred years.

This first volume begins a great, sweeping epic of the early Southwest . . . from the earliest migrations of the ancient Anasazi people to the cruel and bloody conquests of the Rio Grande Valley by the Spanish conquistadors, Francisco Coronado and Don Juan de Oñate.

The Mississippi Valley in western Illinois . . . thirty years after the Civil War. Japheth Bunt, his wife, Hannah, and their young son, Elias, are threatened by a bitter family feud that rages in the woods and on the roads of Hancock County.
As the 19th century rolls into the 20th, a grown Elias is torn between his love for two women and his misplaced loyalty to the notorious outlaw, Charlie Birger . . . as the Bunts struggle to survive a vicious bootleg whiskey war that sweeps across the Mississippi Valley.

The story continues with the fortunes of the Apodaca, Perna, and Bonneau families from Spanish conquest through the late 1800s . . . as generations of Pueblo Indians, Spanish, French, and Italian immigrants struggle to survive in a harsh and bloody land.

The exciting sequel to Coon Creek! Threatened by the ravages of the Great Depression, the Bunts return to Dallas City, Illinois, to live off the family farm. But young Rafe Bunt is restless and sets out to make his own way through the grim and uncertain landscape of America in the 1930s.

The third and final volume resumes near the turn of the 20th century, introducing the first Anglo family to the valley and carrying the story through World War I, a deadly epidemic, Prohibition and racial hatred, and finally World War II and the birth of the nuclear age in the desert wastes of New Mexico.

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© James M. Vesely, . All Rights Reserved Worldwide.