By H.L. Delaney · September 15, 2026

Why the Renegades cycle is one story across many books

People ask why I write these as a cycle instead of finishing one book and moving on. The honest answer is that the thing I am writing about was one connected campaign, and it does not fit inside a single novel.

The record called them renegades

Renegade is the army's word, and the newspapers' word, for Native people who would not stay where they were put. A man who left the reservation was a renegade. A family that went home to the country it came from was a band of renegades. The word turned people defending their homes into criminals, and it did that job so well that it is still the word most of us reach for. I took it back on purpose. The people the record filed under that name were the ones who refused to disappear, and the cycle is named for them.

One campaign, on many fronts

Read the Klamath, Modoc, and Rogue River histories next to each other and the separate incidents start to look like one long campaign. The same decade. The same territorial press printing the same justifications. The same volunteer militias paid by the same bounties. The same treaties signed under pressure and broken the same way, ending in the same removals to the same reservations. A single novel has room for a single war. The machine that ran underneath all of those wars needs more than one book, because the machine was the whole point.

So I write a cycle. Each book takes one part of the country and one stretch of the killing and follows it all the way down. Together they show what the separate histories were built to keep out of view, which is how connected and how deliberate the whole thing was.

The same river, twenty years apart

Here is one thread that shows why the books belong together. In 1852 a man named Ben Wright called the Modoc to a parley on the Lost River and killed the people who came to it. Twenty years later, in the same country, a peace commission asked the Modoc to walk into another tent and trust another set of promises. You cannot understand why Kintpuash would not do that without the earlier betrayal sitting in the room, and the earlier betrayal only means what it means once you see where it leads. A cycle lets a reader carry that memory from one book into the next, the way the people who lived it carried it.

The books talk to each other

Captain Jack and the Original Renegades follows the Modoc War, the lava beds, and the men hanged at Fort Klamath. The Renegade Enos is the second panel, moving through the Rogue River country and the world that produced a man the record was glad to hang and glad to forget. The rivers cross. The same forts appear. A name that is a footnote in one book is a person in the other. I want a reader who finishes one to feel the floor of the next one already under them.

Writing it from the inside

I write from inside the community the record was built to manage, and that account does not arrive in one clean arc with a tidy beginning and end. It comes the way memory comes, in a country you keep returning to, in families that keep showing up, in the same water and the same mountains under a different year. A cycle is the shape the story already has, and I am following it.

Start with either book. They are built to be read in any order, and each one stands on its own. Captain Jack and the Original Renegades and The Renegade Enos are both out now through Basalt Sea Press, with more of the cycle to come.