Outcast and wanderer, Joe Cobden, a half-breed hunchback, becomes Joe Buffalo, famed Kansas buffalo hunter of the 1870s until the buffalo herds diminish and he must learn to live a conventional life.

This epic Gothic Western about a half-Indian outcast who becomes a famous buffalo hunter is “a big sprawling novel of the West as it really was” (The Denver Post). Perhaps Joe Cobden was always destined to be an outcast. His Indian mother died in childbirth, alone on a stagecoach road under a pitch-black prairie sky. His white father abandoned him in the name of his own ambition. The wife of the doctor who adopted him despised him for his mixed race. His classmates teased him for his curved spine. Joe leaves nothing but pain behind as he lights out for the Kansas frontier.

It is the 1870s and Joe makes a name for himself as a famed buffalo hunter, tracking a phantom white buffalo from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. But his glory days as “Joe Buffalo” die as quickly as the slaughtered herds, and he finds himself forced to settle in Valley Forge, where the townsfolk each hide their own twisted secrets.

Heart of the Country paints a broad panorama of a demythologized American West, populated with unforgettable—and often unforgivable—characters, brought to life with stunning imagery and bold, baroque prose.