Red Jacket

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 who becomes ne of Michigan's first civil service game wardens.  His territory:  The Keweenaw Peninsula.  Lute confronts 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.  The violence culminates when a man yells fire in a small building and 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.