Black Dove

Abby Spooner is the mulatto daughter of ex-slaves who escaped from bondage in Kentucky before the Civil War. Fleeing to Kansas they hoped they could find a safe haven that would provide for opportunity for fugitives in a free state on an equal footing with Anglos in the west.

Squatting on a tract of bottom land in eastern Kansas they farmed and eked out a lively hood harvesting a subsistence crop. When "Bleeding Kansas" is terrorized by competing bands of guerillas trying to influence the admission of the state into the union as a free state vs. slave state to balance partisan votes in the Congress of the United States, Abby's parents and little brother are brutally murdered by Quantrill's raiders in 1863.

Raised in a Quaker orphanage in Lawrence, her mixed parentage (descendents of white owners and Negro slaves) provide the mulatto child with the genetic heritage of both races. She is neither white nor black.

Excelling in the Quaker school her mentor, Sara Quitman, trains her to be a teacher with the hope that frontier schools will not discriminate against her star pupil because of race. Teachers are in short supply on the frontier.

Engaged as a teacher by mail order by a group of German farm families settled in Ford County, the innocent and naive Abby leaves the orphanage at age 18 to travel by train to Dodge City with a one way ticket. The train is de-railed by a band of Indians and she is forced to continue her trip in a horse drawn wagon accompanied by cattle buyer, Sam Kluge. They are waylaid and robbed and forced to finish the trip to Dodge on foot, barefoot and bleeding.

Arriving at the railhead town at the same time as drovers from Texas arrive to sell their Longhorn cattle, she is summarily dismissed from her teaching job because of her obvious ethnic origin. Abandoned and on her own, Abby gets mixed up in a free for all between the town banker, Rafe Knu