The legend of Crazy Woman Canyon

About the Book

Manuela Lisa, the beautiful raven-haired daughter of a wealthy Spanish fur trader was born in 1809---the same year as Kit Carson and Abraham Lincoln. She was forced to flee her Saint Louis home and venture westward at the age of 13 after the mysterious-untimely death of her father. At her fathers bedside she received a small packet and, in his dying breath, her father told her a secret that would cause her to mask her feminine identity and disguise herself as a young Mountain Man---traveling west into the wilderness with a fur trapping company---following a route similar to the one Louis and Clark had used several years earlier. Manuela trapped beaver and other fur bearing animals in the Bighorn and Rocky Mountains. During the Heyday of the Mountain Man, Manuela worked and fought alongside many well known trappers and western pioneers including Jed Smith and Jim Bridger. However, her main reason for traveling west was to fulfill her quest. During her quest in the western wilderness she would be kidnapped, shot, stabbed, and bitten by a rattlesnake; mauled by bears and white men as well as red men; staked out and left for dead by Indians; and attacked by wolves. Manuela would eventually find her way to a small town at the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains---becoming a successful hotel owner and a grandmother of many---living to be more than 100 years old. This is her story. It is a story of “true grit”. It is a story of a courageous woman who left her mark in a man’s world in the American Northwest of the 1800s and it is the story of how the Crazy Woman Canyon in north-central Wyoming got its name. Sample of text (the wolves attack) When I awoke it was dark and I was naked and alone, and I was no longer in the tent. I was tethered to four stakes in the middle of a small clearing with rawhide strips and the drying strips were beginning to get very tight on my wrists and ankles. As I lay there in the dark with no way to protect myself from human or nonhuman predators, small animals or even insects, I began to reflect on my life so far. What else did I have to do? What else could I do except wait to be torn apart by a large animal, to be slowly eaten by small ones, or to bleed to death once the flesh on my wrists and ankles was severed by the tightening rawhide. I did not even want to think about what had happened to my babies. So, I reflected. I arrived in this world as an illegitimate half-bread. I scarcely remember my mother. She died when I was six years old. I had a twin brother who I did no really remember but whose face haunted my dreams. I lived for five years in a house with people who despised me but pretended to love me when my father came home for one of his short visits. Then my father gave me a map and told me a secret and he was gone as well. Did he love me? This is hard to know but it does not matter anymore for he is dead. I chose one of the hardest and most dangerous of occupations when I was 13, partly because I wanted to get away from the people who occupied my father’s house and partly because I wanted to go where my father’s words had sent me. Was it end of the rainbow? Perhaps, but it was all I had that was truly mine—the only thing that tied me to my roots—the whispered words and a piece of birch bark with lines and circles drawn on it. After spending more than seven years in the wilderness, posing as a man and doing a man’s work, I finally became a woman only to be left sore, bruised, pregnant, and alone after only one night of love. Was it love? I think it was, but it did not matter anymore now because my lover must be dead. Even my children are probably dead. Would I ever know for sure? Probably, I would never know because I was now very close to death myself. I was thinking --What day was it? If this is the first night that I have been laying here, and it must be because, if not, I would surely be dead by now, then it is July 31, 1833—my twenty-fourth birthday. So, there it is, a

About the Author

Dr. Gary L. Morris was born in Buffalo, Wyoming on November 12, 1954. Dr. Morris is married to a Dutch girl named Lia and has four daughters---Pamela, Deborah, Cynthia, and Linda. He lives in the Netherlands and works in Germany for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). He has a PhD. in Adult Education from Capella University and is the author of the Doctoral Dissertation “Altered States: Using Transactional Analysis Education to Prevent Conflict Escalation and Violence”. Dr. Morris and family enjoy traveling and return frequently to his birth place to enjoy the old west atmosphere and, of course, to visit Crazy Women Canyon.