In 1806, four-year-old William Wiley Joy was sitting on a corral rail in the Carolina backcountry watching his father break a colt when Seminole raiders came out of the trees. By nightfall he was three days gone. His parents survived. They never found him. He grew up in Spanish Florida as Moves With Horses, the adopted son of a woman named Morning Light, raised among the people who had taken him. He learned their language until his English fell away entirely. He learned their land, their horses, and their ways of war, and at fourteen he stood in an American fort while a clerk wrote his description into a book he could not read. In time the frightened white child became a warrior with a Muskogee name - respected by many, and feared by the chief who had once ordered him killed. Then he fell in love with Dancing Hawk, the chief's daughter. Too strong to ignore. Too respected to dismiss. Too close to the chief's blood. When fear and jealousy and power finally collide, Wiley is put on trial before the whole village, and the verdict costs him his mother, his brother, and the only home he remembers. Seventy-three years later, dying in a rented room in Tucson, he tells the whole of it to the estranged son who hasn't spoken to him in twenty-three years - because a man should know where he comes from before the last person who remembers it is gone. Seminole Son is Book One of The Wiley Joy Trilogy, a story that runs eighty-one years from a Carolina cattle pen to a Texas deathbed. William Wiley Joy was a real man and the author's fourth great-grandfather.
