When ninety-one-year-old rancher Franklin Woodstock disappears from his West Texas nursing home, his five presumed heirs squabble over his estate.

"A Woman of the People" is one of Texas best-known and most-respected novels. In this story of the Texas frontier, Capps dramatizes the capture by a Comanche band of a ten-year-old white girl and her five-year-old sister from the upper reaches of the Brazos River a decade before the Civil War.
As the narrative progresses, Helen Morrison slowlyand almost unbeknownst to herselfgoes from being a frightened, rebellious white girl to becoming a woman of the people. Like many of the people who figure in true-life Indian captivity narratives, Helen adopts the ways of the Comanches, marries a...