No Back Down Woman

Mose Allison's life is about to change. After years at sea, he jumped ship in New York and ran south to the Mississippi River, falling in with a young ambitious fur trapper and a runaway slave. There they join up with the legendary No Back Down Woman, who will lead them on the adventure of their young lives as she tries to reunite with her scattered people, the Mandans. It's 1825, and every state south of Pennsylvania is a slave-owning state. Slaves from Africa are the brutalized free labor force and main economic engine of the nation. In the west, the French had a foothold as traders; they married into the tribes for safety and comfort. Custer and Little Big Horn would happen half a century later, and the Americans were still small in numbers, and unimportant. But a few dared to built rough forts and try to harvest furs and beaver pelts. For adventurous fur trappers in the mountains there was an international gold rush; every well-to-do man wanted a beaver felt hat. They would be rich, if they survived coming in to take what they knew wasn't theirs. Lucky for them they had an ally; the Mandans. They gave the young men a place to stay when the river iced over. Then in the spring they would go upriver and clean out every beaver from every stream and kill off a good thing that been going for a thousand years, because they had to have it all. The Mandan People, the American trappers, and the enslavement of black Africans form the backbone of this illustrated adventure.