Forced to marry one of her pirate captives, 16-year-old Ruth and her brother, Jerry, are held prisoner until the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811 prompt their escape through a trackless wilderness where they experience a gunfight and help rescue an Osage family.

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Ruth Harris and her younger brother, Jerry, who are of mixed Cherokee and white heritage, head down the Ohio with their parents to settle new country, perhaps in Arkansas. Pirates kill their parents, and the kids become captives on a Mississippi River island. Ruth is forced into marriage with a ne’er-do-well and bears his child; Jerry seems destined to become a pirate. Then the New Madrid earthquake of 1811 intervenes, flooding the island, sinking towns, creating lakes, and drowning pirates. Crownover describes the earthquake at great length, using Ruth’s wonderful dialect. Jerry’s narrative, too, is beautifully rendered; it’s almost as though Crownover were channeling the great Ozarks folklorist, Vance Randolph. Ruth and Jerry join a Cherokee family headed toward their home in western Arkansas, meeting outlaws, renegade Indians, and kindly backwoodsmen. The land at last stops trembling, winter becomes spring, and maybe they’ve reached the Promised Land; in any case, their adopted people, both Indians and whites, are resourceful, hardworking, and humorous. Quite an agreeable opener to Crownover’s projected four-volume Five Trails West series. --John Mort

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