Woods Cop mystery author Joseph Heywood takes readers to an era when people had to be as hard as the lives they lived. Meet Lute Bapcat, orphan, loner, former cowboy, Rough Rider, beaver trapper, a man who in 1913, with the enthusiastic recommendation by Theodore Roosevelt, himself, becomes one of the Michigan's first civil service game wardens. His territory: The Keweenaw Peninsula, the state's industrial center. Featuring a stunning array of characters, fascinating historical detail, and Heywood's trademark writing about life and work in Michigan's wild, Red Jacket asks Lute to confront an explosive, bloody labor strike; a siege-like sabotage, including a sudden rash of decapitated, spoiled deer; poisoned trout streams and well water; and unusual deforestation-all apparently designed by mine owners to deny nature's bounty to the strikers, and thereby to break the union. The strike's violence culminates in the Italian Hall disaster, during which a man allegedly yells fire in a small building with several hundred people inside. In the panic, 73 people are crushed or die of suffocation, the majority of them the children and wives of striking miners at the hall for a Christmas party. Even with good people dying, the Michigan governor refuses to take sides. Should Lute Bapcat?
- ISBN10 1322090572
- ISBN13 9781322090573
- Publish Date 1 January 2013 (first published 18 September 2012)
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 12 May 2015
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Lyons Press
- Format eBook
- Pages 437
- Language English