Untaming the Valley

by Paul Hunter

Untaming the Valley offers the magical story of how a cowboy mail carrier and a shy librarian could be summoned out of their everyday lives by the living and dead, feel themselves lifted and shimmering in a web of stories of the valley that they discover and share. Enduring realities have been fashioned out of far less nutritious and digestible ingredients.

Paul Hunter’s Untaming the Valley is cast as a contemporary Western. But don’t go looking for fistfights, gunfights, or other kinds of conflict. The book’s fictional valley is a magical place, near Custer’s battlefield, where that bloody, unforgiving history steps hand in hand with the greatest sights, sounds and mysteries that nature has to offer. Here you will find Ryan Doreen and Leila May Carpenter, a cowboy mailman and a shy librarian who join to probe the mystical wonders of the valley, its ancient history alongside its living settlers and all-but-invisible native people. Meet Nighthawk-In-Morning and you will hear the story of The White Bear Cave. Listen as Mayella-Warms-the-Lodge tells how she met her love, Simon-Makes-Horses-Stand. Come ride with us then sit and stay awhile. Have a slice of the best cobbler you’ve ever tasted. And then have a second helping. I can promise you, you will be glad you spent time here. Untaming the Valley is the rarest of works for supplying that hope in portions you can’t resist. At some point in the reading you realize that life would be less without this story, that these characters with their vast hopes and dreams might take you over and become your own. As you read this sure-handed cowboy account of discovery, friendship and history, it will serve as a reminder that there is goodness, hope and magic in plain sight, all but overlooked amid the noise and traffic of our paved, unnatural lives.
– Jim Berry, journalist & author of Of Dust and Blood, 2016.

Though a work of fiction, Untaming the Valley reads like historical nonfiction; the details are factual, well-researched, and engrossing: a story of the search into the past history of this valley and its various layers of inhabitants: indigenous, settlers and newcomers. And the narrative: the dialect, the patois the author uses is authentic, easy to understand, and refreshingly contemporary cowboy. It’s a spoken-word narrative that makes each page, each human and natural encounter come alive as we read. This book is a love story at its core, about two people and their shared love of history, of solving mysteries; a courtship that is given legs by their love of horses and cooking, with mouth-watering descriptions of recipes and meals shared with neighbors. This is also a love story about an ancient Valley, its environment, its animals, and what it comes to mean to its indigenous peoples and to the settlers and newcomers drawn here to live out their lives.
– Phoebe Bosche, managing editor, Raven Chronicles Press