Winter 1855. It's a hungry, burgeoning nation, and Quinton Stoddard is drawn into hardship and adventure by his only friend, Silas Soule. First as a Jayhawker during the Bleeding Kansas era, and afterwards, as one of Kit Karson’s soldiers in the U.S. Army during the Civil War and several of its campaigns to conquer the American Indian.

‍But when the territorial government and one of her darling commanders, Colonel John Chivington, plot the massacre of hundreds of defenseless Cheyenne and Arapaho at Sand Creek, both men are put in an impossible situation—to follow their orders and commit a massacre or refuse to obey.

They will face dire consequences regardless, but the question becomes less about what will happen to them and more about what they can live with in the wake of their decisions.

The American West is reawakened in Refusal to Obey through the adventures and hardships of Quinton Stoddard while he fights for freedom and then the nation’s westward expansion. Quinton is willing to commit violence on behalf of a cause he believes in, but what happens when the cause he’s told to believe in, ordered to partake in, is wrong? 

With historical figures like Silas Soule, Kit Carson and John Chivington, Chiefs Black Kettle and Bull Bear, Walt Whitman and more, this novel takes readers into a world that is their own, and yet largely unknown to them. A world at the heart of what it means to fight for a nation, on one side or the other, to kill and lose a part of oneself, to search for what has been lost and to have the unimaginable truths of war thrust upon the spirit of oneself. A world at the very heart of what it means to be American.