So Wild a Dream - Hardcover

Blevins, Win

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0765305739 ISBN 13: 9780765305732

Publisher: Forge Books, 2003

Synopsis

Into a West too unmapped for the explorers, too bad for the badmen, too wild for any white men, came the mountain men. They blazed the trails across the Rocky Mountains, opened the vast country between the Missouri frontier and the Pacific, and rose into legend.

Sam Morgan has itchy feet and a hungry spirit. In 1822 life near Pittsburgh is far too hemmed in. He cares nothing for commerce or industry. He nurtures a wild dream of a woodsman's life, a truly free American life.

But where? Down the Ohio River? Up the Mississippi? Perhaps the far West. Since Captains Lewis and Clark came back, people are telling stories about the Shining Mountains.

Along the way Sam finds companions and adventures. For guidance, a half-breed Delaware Indian and Captain William Clark himself. For friends, a con man, a madam, and an assortment of shaggy men who have tasted the waters of those mountains.

Sam first learns the fur trade from Bible-toting Jedediah Smith and Irish Tom Fitzpatrick, both already becoming legends. He also learns from the Indians. At the Ree villages, he comes face to face with treachery and instant death; among the Crows, he learns love of a woman; from the Bois Brules, Snakes, Pawnees, and other tribes, he learns native crafts, lore, and mysticism.

But his great teacher is hard-won experience. He makes a grueling seven-hundred-mile trek, alone and on foot, across the Great Plains to Fort Atkinson on the Missouri. On the way he survives a holocaust of a prairie fire and learns the price of survival in the pitiless Western wilds, and something of who he is and wants to become.

Not since Frederick Manfred's Lord Grizzly and Vardis Fisher's Mountain
Man has there been so gripping, authentic, and captivating a story of the men
who matched the mountains of the Great American West.

About this title

About the Author

Win Blevins is an authority on the Plains Indians and the fur-trade era of the West. His rollicking tribute to the mountain man, Give Your Heart to the Hawks, remains in print thirty years after its first publication; his novel of Crazy Horse, Stone Song, earned several prestigious literary prizes; and such novels as Charbonneau, The Rock Child, and RavenShadow have established him as among the best of writers of the West. He lives in Utah's Canyonlands with his wife, Meredith, also a novelist.

Reviews

Life in rural Pennsylvania in the 1820s doesn't hold much appeal for young, adventurous, ambitious Sam Morgan. He decides to make his life--and maybe his fortune--on the frontier, but his first step is to get there. He secures a job as a hand on a riverboat, and the adventure begins. His crewmates are the usual assortment of rascals, rapscallions, and borderline crooks, among them a half-breed Delaware Indian, a scam artist, a wily riverboat captain, and a former prostitute who may be more dangerous than any of her companions. In their travels up and down the rivers, the crew experience a multitude of adventures, including a bloody confrontation with two brothers who had been bounced from the crew. Sam provides muscle on the boat, and his marksmanship keeps the crew supplied with fresh game when they anchor at nightfall. Author Blevins, an expert on early American fur trade, introduces his Rendezvous series with this entertaining, vivid portrait of frontier America as seen through the eyes of an impressionable youth. Wes Lukowsky
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Forge Books
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0765305739
• ISBN 13: 9780765305732
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400