L R Spencer

Sourwater Creek L R Spencer

In 2001, John Smith drifted into the small Montana town of Ten Mile and into a job as a deputy in the Daley County Sheriff's Department. In 2012, he was still a deputy sheriff, but he had the option of becoming a fulltime rancher. In his eleven years in law enforcement in Daley County, he had made friends and enemies, picked up a wife, and been involved in solving larger scale crimes than you would expect in a sparsely populated rural area. Now he was on the brink of becoming a father. If he stayed in Daley County, his only two options seemed to be law enforcement or ranching. He wasn't sure that he wanted to take over his father-in-law's ranch or to continue keeping the peace in the midst of an energy boom. For the present, however, he was stuck with doing both. He and Vivian needed the extra income from his job as deputy, and Vivian's father needed help on the ranch. Smith hoped 2012 would be a placid year. It turned out differently. Murders, riots, well blow-outs, fires, and corruption fostered by the influx of oil money into a poor rural county made 2012 memorable for all the wrong reasons.