Flat Top Mountain Ranch: The Beginning

As in all wars, young men volunteer to fight. The Union recruited Jack Donaldson from the Catskill Mountains in New York to whip the Rebels into submission and return home before the next harvest. After he survives two years of war, watches his closest friends die in battle, and suffers a gunshot wound at Gettysburg, he's had enough. Jack decides to muster out and start a new life by heading west on the Santa Fe Trail.

In Louisiana, a Confederate major convinced a Louisiana detachment of free-born black men, including Ty Jones, to help the South repel the northern invaders. Ty leaves the peaceful, sheltered plantation of his childhood and marches off to war, full of pride. Brutal wartime conditions and senseless discrimination are a rude awakening to the outside world and after humiliating defeat at Vicksburg, he returns home. With the advice of his father, he leaves war and the aftermath of the Southern defeat behind and heads west in search of a new opportunity.

The two veterans from opposite sides of the war meet on the Santa Fe Trail, discover they have plenty in common, and form a partnership. Their goal: start a cattle ranch in the rough country of the west Texas plains and make it a place to call their own. Their dreams come with a price. Their pasts haunt them as they struggle to establish the Flat Top Mountain Ranch during the Westward Expansion and Indian Wars.

James E. Doucette is a retired businessman and part-time rancher. He grew up in the Northeast and moved to Texas in 1983. In 1988, he and his wife, Denise, purchased the Flat Top Mountain Ranch. One thing they've learned about ranching is that when the fences are down, the cattle are scattered, and the Texas High Plains winter wind is blowing, there are only two people out chasing the cattle-the rancher and his wife.