Peter Glassman

The Silver Concho Peter Glassman

It's 1878 and Dr. Jacob Cotter has assumed a role of updating his Texas physician colleagues at educational meetings throughout his home state. Cotter is returning from Dallas to his home in Endura, Texas via train, which gets derailed outside of Jennings, Texas, by outlaws posing as hostile Comanches. The purpose of the attack is to kill Abner Worthley, an Indian Affairs Officer from Washington. Worthley's mission is to validate the US peace treaty and ceding of a territorial land grant to the Comanches. Worthley is murdered. However, Cotter and a young woman survive. Cotter's injuries leave him with memory loss dating back to his time in 1868 when he was a bounty hunter. He has no recall of his being an MD, a husband and father, or what happened during the train sabotage. Natalie Tatum, the woman survivor, remembers vividly the phony Comanches and the murderers. Both Cotter and Tatum are removed from the train wreck by a Comanche band and taken to the Indian camp for recovery. Tory Manning, the land developer behind the train ambush, learns of the survivors and marks them for death. His main goal for the incident is to nullify the Comanche land grant and peace accord by blaming the incident on Chief Gray Eagle and his tribe. Life for Cotter becomes a series of flashbacks. Memory of his last ten years is piecemeal. He needs stimulation to find his identity by interacting with people, places, and trigger events from his past. Senator Mortimer Pignast, Mrs. Sadie Cotter from Endura, and a Comanche Indian from Cotter's Post-Civil War days are his only reference points. Cotter is stuck in his gunfighter mode. Aware that not only he, but now the people who claim to know him, have now become targets of Manning's thugs, Cotter must help his friends and the Indians in any way he can. From Senator Pignast, he learns their problems are confounded because President Rutherford Hayes has decreed that the country's mission to develop and settle the West includes isolating Indians who obstruct the country's goal. The government's objective is in direct conflict with the survival of Cotter, his wife, Pignast, and a tribe of Comanches.