Book excerpt: SPUR AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR ROD MILLER It is 1840. The fur trade has all but ended and trappers in Taos feel the pinch. With a band of Ute Indians, they follow the Old Spanish Trail to California to steal horses and mules, then return and reap the profits in Santa Fe. The unprecedented raid results in the theft of some 3,000 animals. Daniel Boone Pickens, a young man on the run from the law in Missouri and in search of a future, signs on for the adventure. Nooch, a young Ute, follows the leader of his band to prove his worth as a warrior. A young vaquero from California, Juan Medina, finds himself involved more from circumstance than choice. Along the trail, the young men forge bonds that surpass race and culture as they face hunger and thirst, fire and flood, bullet and blade. And together they grieve the deaths of more than a thousand of the stolen horses and mules on a mad dash across the dry and desolate Mojave Desert. Based on the real-life exploits of mountain men “Pegleg” Smith, “Old Bill” Williams, and Jim Beckwourth with Ute leader Wakara, A Thousand Dead Horses dramatizes conflicts in the evolving Old West.