The Starving Time

Most historians credit iron and the built-in immunities the Europeans brought with them across the Atlantic as being the primary factors that gave them the means to conquer the five hundred nations that occupied North America.

For the Western Plain tribes, an additional mitigating factor helped----what the natives called "The Starving Time". Right now, this time of the year during the tail end of winter, but before spring has arrived to warm the earth and spawn its new growth.

It usually refers back to the winter of 1609-1610 for the new colonist at James Fort with terrible food shortages and many attacks. But the natives suffered 'The Starving Time' once every year during the cold, bleak winter.

Of those tribes, the Comanche earned the reputation of being the most adept at war. If they'd been a true nation, instead of a conglomeration of chieftains and clans, they might have never been defeated in spite of their primitive weapons and lack of stockpiles. As it was, it took the military into the 1880s to finally pacify the last of the renegades.


Unlike the Europeans, American natives gathered no hay or grain for their horses. They had no smokehouses, root cellars, or means of preserving fall's excess. This left them at a tremendous disadvantage with the military men with full bellies who mounted their campaigns against the Indians.

In my book two of the Texas Romance Family Saga, HEARTS STOLEN, my hero, Levi Buckmeyer, a young Texas Ranger witnesses the Treaty of Tehuacana Creek between Sam Houston and Buffalo Hump, among other Comanche chieftains. His orders that resulted from the agreement were to travel to Comanche camps and pick up the white women and children the clans had stolen and bring them to Austin.

One he rescues, he’d known as a child who’d actually been his sister’s good friend. The red-head Sassy have been living five years as Bold Eagle’s third wife, and in his camp, birthed her first son, blonde-haired, blue-eyed son Charley of her husband. She had no idea of the pregnancy when she’d been captured. But then the Indian regrets letting her go and appears in book three and even later volume as worthy of a news report.

Bio : Caryl McAdoo prays her story brings God glory, and a quick scroll through her novels’ rankings by Christian readers attests to the Father’s faithfulness. She loves writing almost as much as singing the new songs He gives her—look her up on YouTube to hear a few. Her high school sweetheart husband won her heart fifty-one years ago, and now they share four children and seventeen grandsugars. Ron and Caryl live in the woods south of Clarksville, seat of Red River County in far Northeast Texas, waiting expectantly for God to open the next door.  

Contact Links : Links :  

Website   /  Author Pages:  Amazon   BookBub   Simon & Schuster   BookGorilla      Southern Writers Magazine   Sweet Americana Sweethearts   /  Newsletter  /   

YouTube  /  Facebook   /  Blogs:  The Word & the Music    HeartWings (Devotional) 

Sweet Americana Sweethearts (Historical)   /  GoodReads  /  Google+  /  LinkedIn  /

Twitter  /  Pinterest  /