Berrigan's Ride

Kent Berrigan never expected to fall in love with raw, remote Montana Territory. He recognizes himself in the night flight of wild horses running past his shack in the gold fields of Madison County, 1866. "His pulse stimulated to breaking in this land of intemper-ance, temper, and indifference with an edge on its own terms. He yearned to run with the herd--as with the horses, another life formed a past he ran from, or a future he was running toward..."

Kent settles on Norwegian Creek with other Rebels, a dog and a captured wild horse. After a friend was murdered, he follows his heart to California gold camps in pursuit of Marion Patton, an independent woman with a vision for the country, if not of her own destiny. Eventually, an Alder Gulch mine tragedy near Virginia City forces Kent to confront his unresolved relationship with the North.

Jan Elpel, Psy.D, grew up near the Headwaters of the Missouri River. That sense of history frames the stories she creates set in the mid-nineteenth century. Her family s (Jewett's) lifestyle among descendants of early immigrants in the 1940s was little different than that of the settlers in Berrigan's Ride eighty years earlier. She wrote the 1958 John Colter pageant for the original Colter s Run in Three Forks, Montana. Her family later moved to historic gold camps of Virginia City and Pony. Elpel s series of historical novels celebrate the wild horses of Madison and Jefferson Counties, and the Jewett s herd of horses that thundered off the dry hills to water at the handpump in front of the Parker Homestead.