Rabbit Boss

ONE OF THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE’S 100 GREATEST WESTERN NOVELS • From the author of the first annual California Classics Litquake Barbary Coast Award, comes the story of four generations of the Washo in Nevada and Eastern California—a story of dreams, dying, the loss of power, death, and apotheosis.

"Rabbit Boss deserves to become an American classic. A great novel, spanning a century in the life and death of an Indian tribe, told with epic perspective and infinite compassion."—National Observer

“The Indian experience of the last 120 years of a size and scope that is awesome. Sanchez is a man of tremendous vision.” —Robert Kirsch, Los Angeles Times

Rabbit Boss is about the doomed hunter Gayabuc, whose first sight of the white man is his witness to the great disaster of the Donner Party in 1846. The time of Gayabucs son, Captain Rex, is set against the gold and silver filled mountains of the Sierra. Hallelujah Bob, the surviving son of Captain Rex, tries to live the sacred life on the shores of Lake Tahoe, but he is isolated from his past and doomed to an alien future. It is against a landscape of despair that Joe Birdsong inherits the once honored position of Rabbit Boss, beginning his astounding flight back through time.

This is a landmark work of twentieth-century American literature, a novel in which the tragic experience of the American Indian is made real and profoundly moving.