Bound, like many other strong words, finds its meaning in the
perceptions of those it affects. To the Van Sheltons, it is positive and
deep-rooted, defining their ties to a vast amount of land abundant in
the timber, cattle, and silver that make them the wealthiest and the
most powerful family in the town of Wyandotte and influential throughout
the state of Nevada.
To J.D. Rohr, who has no money and few
prospects, bound is a hopeful force, driving him to Wyandotte, where he
assumes the identity of Jesse Bodine in a desperate attempt to live in
obscurity, hiding from his reputation as one of the West’s most feared
gunfighters.
For Dr. Frederick Albert Carlisle, an aristocratic
Boston physician who becomes Jesse’s friend despite their romantic
rivalry, bound is a magnetic lure that compels him to abandon his Beacon
Hill mansion, his upper-class privileges, and his affluent patients in a
quest to give meaning to his life by serving poor westerners sorely in
need of his healing knowledge.
As for Honoria Lowell Blaire and
Lillian Tomlinson Wellesley, blue-blooded descendants of two of New
England’s oldest and most distinguished families, bound represents the
chains that will bind them to “a God-forsaken wilderness” if they choose
to live with the men they love instead of clinging to their pampered
lives among America’s nobility.
And for the incomparably
beautiful Jolene Lloyd, being bound is the same as virtual imprisonment
when she is coerced into saving her family from financial catastrophe by
being shackled to a ruthless, emasculated tyrant driven by hatred and
bitterness to take control of Wyandotte and force the mighty Van
Sheltons to grovel at his feet.
These and the other men and women
of Wyandotte, the good and the bad, battle for a quarter of a century
to determine their region’s fate during the fading years of the Western
Frontier.
