When the Birds Go Silent – Paperback

Cairook knew what the wagon road meant before the first wheel turned in the sand. He had guided American surveyors up the Colorado River in friendship. He watched them draw their maps and send their reports east. He understood the grammar of it. The road was a sentence, and the Aha Macav were the period.

In the summer of 1858, the first emigrant train on Beale’s new road reached the Colorado crossing. The birds went silent. The warriors moved.

When the Birds Go Silent is the story of the Mojave War of 1858 to 1859, told in alternating voices: the river people who fought to hold their valley, and the soldiers, emigrants, and Washington officials who took it from them, not out of cruelty, but out of the ordinary working of a machine handed a problem and told to produce an answer.

The answer was more than six hundred soldiers, two howitzers, and a fort on a bluff above the river. The river is still there.