Lifeblood

Sarah Austen, a young English dissenting Mormon, against all odds, succeeds in her goal to become a medical doctor in the wilds of nineteenth-century northern Nevada. This is the story of her harrowing journey with her parents by handcart from Iowa to Great Salt Lake. The family is broken apart when Sarah’s father chooses to take another wife. Sarah and her mother cross the desert to Genoa, Nevada’s first settlement. There, at the foot of the Sierra Nevada, Sarah and her mother forge new lives. Other new arrivals to the area are Walther Rottenburg, an immigrant rancher from Saxony, and Giovanni Corveddu, an immigrant from Sardinia who works for a mining consortium. The ranchers and the miners have a running battle over water rights, and it is water, that substance so precious to desert life, that gives this novel its title. “Lifeblood is a brilliant, accurate, and powerful story of life, illness, and death in 19th-century Nevada. Ann Funk effectively deals with mining, ranching, water rights, the injustice of polygamy, and ill-fated love. She takes us into Native American and Chinese cultures but more importantly she highlights the struggle of the main character to become one of the first female doctors in the West. Lifeblood is an extremely well written historical novel. It has it all and is a must read.” -Dr. Anton Sohn, founder of the University of Nevada School of Medicine’s History of Medicine Program and author of Healers of 19th-Century Nevada.