The Devil's Own: A Romance of the Black Hawk War

A first-person narrator recounts youthful service at a remote frontier fort and how he becomes embroiled in the upheaval of the Black Hawk War. A desperate riverboat card game stakes property and enslaved people, setting off personal rivalries—chiefly with the gambler Kirby—and a cascade of violent and clandestine episodes. The narrative follows captures and escapes on steamboats and keel-boats, undercover searches, raids on cabins, refuge on a swamp island, a field of massacre, and the sheltering of fugitives as the party moves toward safety. Against a backdrop of frontier lawlessness and military action the story traces duty, survival, and the moral costs of conflict.