The Mestizo

About the Book

With gold in his saddlebags from a prospecting trip into Mexico, and chased by a posse including the mestizo Panchito, Dan Greenwood was planning to rebuild his ranch, the Crazy Q, but he was facing two kinds of trouble: romance on the ranch from a flirtatious visitor and violence brought to the desert by the mestizo, who had a score to settle with Dan. This is a colourful tale of Old Arizona set in 1889,with romance, violence, and a climax that is literally explosive. American newspapers in 1955 gave this novel glowing reviews; one compared it to the "best of Eugene Manlove Rhodes", an early Western novelist.

The descriptions of the desert are real and mesmerizing, while the characterization is vivid, memorable, and authentic to the era. The author knew the desert first hand, and his rich experience shows through in his remarkable description.

About the Author

Bill Parks was born on October 14, 1897 on a farm on Iuka, Kansas. After working on farms and ranches across the West, Bill enlisted in the U.S. Army during World War I, and served in France for one year. After returning home he worked as a farm and ranch hand and later on other jobs such as lumbermill hand, cotton picker, street car motorman, crane operator at Boulder Dam (now Hoover Dam), as a motion picture extra and on his own as a gold and silver prospector.

Bill first came to Arizona in 1924. In the winter of 1940/41 , while working as a horse wrangler at Red Star Stable in Phoenix, Arizona, he met and married Clara Lukens. Together they worked on farms and ranches until moving to Grand Canyon where Bill was a guide on the South Rim and out to the Indian Country from 1946 to 1962. They had two sons while in Grand Canyon, and the family moved to Prescott, Arizona in December, 1961; Bill returned to work at the Canyon on weekends.

Bill wrote a column, Under the Southwest Sun, for the Prescott Courier for 28 years until he died on June 15, 1995. He wrote a novel about the Navajo people called The Seventh Horizon, published posthumously by his wife in 2002 through 1st Books Publishing. It is available from amazon.com. Much of his life and adventures are in the memoir, Horizon Hunters, by his wife, Clara Lukens Parks, also available at amazon.com