Audiobook CHAPTER 5 Abandoned on McClellan Creek

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In late September 1874, as General Miles’s cavalry closes in, a fleeing Cheyenne raiding party abruptly abandons young Julia and Adelaide German in the high grass of the Texas Panhandle, forcing their older sisters to ride on and assume they are dead. Driven by sheer survival instinct, seven-year-old Julia leads five-year-old Adelaide along wagon ruts to a deserted army camp on McClellan Creek. For nearly three weeks, the two girls endure freezing nights burrowed in leaves, scavenge on discarded hardtack, wild onions, and hackberries, and comfort each other as prowling wolf packs circle their makeshift shelter.

Their solitary ordeal ends on November 7 when Grey Beard’s fleeing Cheyenne band arrives at the creek, and women scoop up the emaciated, sore-covered children. That evening, their captive older sister Sophia spots them alive in the camp, though she is violently shoved away into the shadows before they can reunite. The following dawn, the village is plunged into total chaos as Miles’s blue-coated cavalry charges down from the ridge, storming the camp in a haze of gunfire and drawn sabers. 

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