Wolves of Eden is set during Red Cloud’s War (1866–68)—an uprising of Sioux, Northern Cheyenne and Arapahoe Indians against the encroachment of migrants to the gold fields of Montana. In response to Indian attacks on travelers, the U.S. Army sent several companies of infantry to protect white “pilgrims” and establish a fort on the Bozeman Trail in the isolated Powder River country in the Dakota Territories. Nearly half the soldiers manning Fort Phil Kearny—and thirty-odd of the eighty-one killed in the ensuing Fetterman Massacre of the fort’s troops by Indians, the Battle of One Hundred in the Hand, as it is known to the Lakota Sioux—were native-born Irish immigrants or first generation Irish-Americans.
As such, Fort Phil Kearny as seen in this novel was a real place. It is a real place and you can visit a wonderful recreation of the fort—the original was abandoned in 1868 and burned by Red Cloud’s warriors—just outside of Storey, Wyoming.
To spare the reader the same confusion I experienced during my research, I have changed the name of another fort which features in the novel—Fort Kearney, in present-day Nebraska—to Fort Caldwell.
Many of the events in the novel are as true to the historical record as I could render them within the bounds of fiction. The crime for which the brothers stand accused is fictional, though based on similar incidents in other Western forts. The crimes perpetrated by the government and army of the United States on the indigenous peoples of the American West are real. Fiction has nothing on them.
Kevin McCarthy
November 2017
Dublin, Ireland