Author

The Pink Lady: The Many Lives of Helen Gahagan Douglas

Sally Denton is the author of American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 1857; The Bluegrass Conspiracy: An Inside Story of Power, Greed, Drugs, and Murder; and, with Roger Morris, The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, 1947—2000. She received Western Heritage Awards in 2002 and 2004, a Lannan Literary grant in 2000, and, for her body of work, the Nevada Silver Pen Award of 2003 for distinguished literary achievement. Her award-winning investigative reporting has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and American Heritage.

In 2005 Alfred A. Knopf published Faith and Betrayal: A Pioneer Woman’s Passage in the American West. The book tells the story of Jean Rio, a deeply spiritual widow, who in the 1850s was moved by the promises of Mormon missionaries and set out from England for Utah. Traveling across the Atlantic by steamer, up the Mississippi by riverboat, and westward by wagon, Rio kept a detailed diary of her extraordinary journey.  Sally Denton is Rio’s great-great-granddaughter.

Sally Denton received her BA in English Literature from the University of Colorado at Boulder. From 2006 to 2007 she was a guest lecturer at the University of New Mexico, Department of History. Denton lives in New Mexico with her three children.