The Angel's Backbone: A Season of Effectuation

Prequel to the Rainbow Road Trilogy
It is 1869. The Transcontinental Railroad across the country will be completed within weeks. However, there are those that must go now. The last wagon train to leave Independence, Missouri, is led by a former Confederate artillery officer, Rufus Ambrose Stubbs. His background and his nephew Virgil's are closely guarded secrets. Three others will join them, each in a rush to get out West.
After countless delays and burials, the exhausted party arrives in The Dalles, Oregon, too late in the season for safe passage down the Columbia River and are no longer certain why they came. Oregon is not what they expect.
The treacherous Barlow Road around Mount Hood offers the only other route to the Willamette Valley until the next spring. However, a recent snowfall renders the road nearly impassable. Will they complete the final one-hundred miles to the Willamette Valley, known to be the hardest of the entire two-thousand-mile Oregon Trail? To survive, each will make a difficult choice.