A cannon booms at high noon, and the race begins in the Oklahoma land rush of 1893.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from In The Great Quiet by Laura Vogt, which releases on April 1st 2026.
Amid the crowd is Minnie Hoopes. Tenacious and fiercely independent, she is determined to endure the brutal frontier and create a life of her own. Guarding her solitude, she distances herself from bordering homesteaders and finds peace under the starry nights of the vast frontier. But this is outlaw country, and Minnie soon has the blood of two gunfighters on her hands. After a renegade outlaw named Stot discovers her secrets, she forms an unlikely friendship with him. With each passing season, Minnie’s past grows more haunting and threatens the future she has risked everything to build. Minnie raced into the Wild West alone, but her grandest journey in the frontier wilderness is one she never saw coming.
Based on the true story of the author’s great-great-grandparents, this sweeping and transportive survival story explores a woman’s connection with the land, her reconciliation with the past, and her elemental search for home against all odds.
Settle in, I’ve stories to tell.
AUTUMN
September to November 1893
Caldwell, Kansas
Boundary Line of Oklahoma Territory
September 16, 1893
almost high noon
It begins with the earth.
She says,
Once, they listened for my voice. With the crash of dawn over the horizon, they’d press their palms against my skin, wet me with their tears. A swipe of soil across the brow, a crumble of my body in their palms, my cinnamon-red hue as sacred as blood. Once, I was cherished. But that was longago.
Today, I scream, and you do not hear.
Today, I’m brittle and fragmented and so thirsty I spit out coughs of despair and ash. You call it dust storm, drought, famine. Today, your storytellers speak of a hunt. I feel your wheels scrape into my skin, wagons collapsing my throat, hoofbeats stomping along my spine. Then—alone in the wild distances something begins. Across my body, women speak. Memories intertwine, forward and backward, across eons, the reality of one ancestor blending with the truth of another: a new history of women arriving.
Once, the prairie was quiet and I was alone. But that was long ago.
Time continues to turn, around and around I spin. Today, I will tell you such tales. Of women who drove cattle dressed as men and women who swallowed thunderbolts as newborns. Women determined, women lost. Women seemingly ordinary, women larger than life. Some women recorded in the annals of history, others told as fireside lore.
Settle in, listen. I have stories to tell.
CHAPTER ONE
Sometimes I wondered if I was too comfortable with the dark passageways within me. If I knew those secret, unlit spaces too well. But shadows don’t bother me overmuch. And sakes alive, no one was honest with themselves anyhow, everyone creating their own aliases. The Kid, Wild Bill, Bitter Creek, Rose of Cimarron. I didn’t have a summer name yet—but perhaps by sundown.
I jerked my wrist, checked my watch. Ten minutes till high noon.
The crowd was the colors of black, smoke, fire. The prairie gingerroot, ash, clay. Fifteen thousand souls vibrating in their skin, bodies sweat slicked with anticipation. In moments, gunshots would blast, and the race would begin.
I wrought Cricket’s reins and leaned forward in my saddle. Soon we’d gallop into the unknown frontier—I’d flee past and grasp something new. One hundred and fifteen thousand pioneers had registered for forty-two thousand homesteads, at least that’s the tale that went round twilight bonfires. Wretched grum odds. It was told this race tempted the darkest of humanity, those with the most greed, with the most chilling stories, and come nightfall, half would drag north again, dismissed back to their haunted, hungry lives, their daisy-printed skirts trawling behind them in the red dirt. Today the quickest, the harshest, the most lawless would win. But today, women had a chance.
How much longer? Seven minutes.
The cowboy beside me gnawed tobacco, hips slouched in his saddle, stallion’s shoulders bony. I didn’t believe his nonchalance: His fists twitched with anxiety. Blistering sunbeams struck through the clouds of dust to burnish the wooden handle of his Winchester. Like me, he’d tied his supplies about his racehorse: a tin pail clanging against a frying pan, a Colt revolver strapped beside a sack of oats, a white claim flag snapping in the wind. I paid little mind to what his flag said. But mine was stamped, in red the hue of paintbrush wildflowers, with my name: Minnie Hoopes.
The cowboy spit. Curled his lip at me.
I winked back.
“Where’s your husband, doll?”
“Buried that mouthy feller in the ground. Dug the hole myself,” I said.
He sneered and looked away.
Wasn’t true. I’d never had a husband nor murdered him, but I didn’t have patience for such an attitude. Cowboys like him bullied women like me, those who sought their own homestead, those unmarried or widowed, divorced or deserted. And, on that matter, I wouldn’t be marrying anytime soon. As I’d then forfeit my land to my husband.
Maybe the cowboy was a bank robber or horse thief. Or perhaps a cattleman looking to gobble up some land to sell before the summer roundup. And he was one of thousands. I’d never seen anything like this swarming crowd of coal and umber before. There were blacksmiths and bankers, gospel preachers and tight-jawed widows, formerly enslaved folks and even one dapper gentleman wobbling over the cracked earth on a bicycle. And of course—criminals of every kind.
It’d been a fiery, impatient summer. Water had run dry a while ago. Supplies had dwindled. We were hot, thirsty, barbaric. A drought and an economic depression, the Panic of 1893, swept across our country. And true enough, panic hovered over the crowd like a fog. But as for me, I’d experienced desolation. There was no way in all-fired creation I’d go back to Kansas. What actually terrified me, those nights under the starlit sky waiting for the Strip to open, was myself. What wouldn’t I do to grasp my own future?
Storytellers prophesied that today began a new age. An era unlike any before: desperate, wrathy, full of havoc and ruin. Plain speaking? Today would be an all-overish disaster. And yet, in the mayhem, I didn’t observe disorder and brutality. I saw possibility. I’d always relished the annihilation of control. I’m not saying I approved, just saying what was.
I glanced at my wristwatch. Five minutes.
Behind me, thousands of covered wagons clamored with unruly children, chattering chickens, moaning cows. A mother sat on the bench of her prairie schooner, a fabricated smile static below her crisp poke bonnet, a basket of fruit clutched between her hands, a bawling toddler gripping her skirts. Around me crowded a flock of buckboard wagons and buggies. Before me, a smudge of roughened cowboys and criminals cloaked in black vests and Stetsons, leaning forward over their racehorses. They stretched for miles along the boundary line, their jackets a long smear of graphite across the muted soil. Soldiers maintained the line, hands resting on their rifles. And beyond, our prairie.
The expanse sloped to an unending horizon. A vast sweep of bone-colored pastureland strewn with craggy grasses and clumps of red soil; the meadow shades of gold and saffron and crumbled redwood. The earth, bursting with stories. The land, rumbling with sound.
I sipped from my canteen. The tea leaves failed to mask the foul-awful, salty taste of the water. In a buggy beside me, my older brother Willie patted his brocade waistcoat, searching for a smoke or the time, his other hand clasping the horses’ reins. He caught my gaze, and his face split in a wide grin full of teeth and mischief and premonition. On the bench beside him, my eldest brother, Ezra, glowered at the boundless universe before us, his whip clenched in his fist. Willie gossiped with the folks next to us, making pals along the way, as he always did. Those sweltering weeks camping before the territory opened, I’d hauled barrels of water from the creek to sell for twenty cents a ladle, while Willie had charmed a circle round town, collecting friends and whiskey. And Ezra, well, he’d scowled at the skyline and yelled at the sun to get moving.
My brothers sought broad ranges suitable for crops and cattle, hopefully miles and epochs away from my own claim. Rather than a barren patch of grassland, I’d scouted rolling fields, nestled up to a wandering creek and flanked by a wildwood. Weeks ago, we’d raced across the Strip, training our horses and determining our route. Beneath the prismatic summer sun, I’d pressed my black ankle boots into the dry clay and eaten from a bramble of sand plums. I’d found an isolated space, perfect to breed my horses. I yearned, desperately, for somewhere faraway, with clear water trickling by.
Wind lashed hair across my face. Minutes now.
And then the hollers and shuffling vanished—even the horses held their breath. It was a quiet distinct from anything I’d known before. The hush eerie and unsettling and somehow full: heavy with hope and longing. I slipped my fingers along Cricket’s buckskin withers, hummed a reassurance to him.
The crowd tugged toward the prairie, awaiting the distant boom of the cannon. I untied the bow clasped round my throat and dragged the navy gingham of my bonnet across my face, swiping off layers of dust and sweat. I shoved my hat in a pocket and swallowed, breathless.
One minute.
A wail sounded behind me, some babe unaware of the gravity of this moment. The cry shot shivers down my neck. The roar of the wind ebbed, abandoning us to silence. A pause. I felt on the edge of my own story, tottering between known and unknown. I gulped soil-flecked air, leaned forward, gripped Cricket’s black mane, my heart thrashing against my bones.
Boom.
A thunder of hooves, a riot of gunfire, the cannon’s echo haunting the length of my spine. I kicked Cricket, and we shot forward.
The crowd roared with hollers and whoops as we galloped downhill. Dust surged in a thick red vapor. The sound unfamiliar, a combustion of flesh and cloth, sweat and expectation, like the reverberation of thunderclouds.
Buckboards jolted and coughed. Wagons crumpled, wooden limbs strewn about the dirt.
A stallion reared, legs kicking at the dust cloud, panicked. The rider held on, face ashen, veins bulging on his forehead. Then he was thrown backward, tossed to roll about the prairie, surely now trampled to death. Before me, another horse collapsed.
I jerked Cricket’s reins, avoided the calamity.
Behind me, my brothers’ buggy shattered across the terrain—but they still followed. Those on racehorses shot ahead, the schooners fell behind, and a mist of carmine and brown swelled between. The wind tasted of dirt and minerals, of the deep mysteries lost in the underneath. Below, the ground throbbed with hoofbeats. The earth pulsed, as if we shook a heartbeat back into the dying land.
A spoked wheel busted in the gorge of a buffalo wallow: The buckboard rattled, then crashed. I gripped Cricket with my thighs and leaned into the swelling clouds of earth. Nothing seemed solid. Just sound and motion. Everything a nebulous whirl, carbon and ash and copper and the white of claim flags flashing like starlight, the dust blurring this moment to something like a delusion. This race etched itself over my past, redefining all that came before. I recognized it would become a pivot of my life, separating after from before.
Round the fires, folks whispered of what horrors might come on this day, of what some might stoop to in pursuit of their greed. Robbery, assault, murder. In this territory, my natural lawlessness would have value. This was a day where you needed to lose control, to be comfortable with those hidden corridors of your flesh, to explore your own darkness. I didn’t know my limits nor what I could live with.
What I knew? I wouldn’t be going back north, and I had no idea what I’d do to stay. I’d never much respected rules. And that was what scared me. Not prophecies of blood or ruin, but my thirst for so much, for everything, for something of my own.
