Synopses & Reviews
Sam Morgan, once a young runaway from Philadelphia, now a seasoned fur trapper and mountain man, faces the most daunting task of his adventuresome life. It is 1827 and he, together with the trapping brigade commanded by Jedediah Smith, has been expelled from Mexican California. To his unending sorrow, Meadowlark, Sam's beloved Indian wife, has died in childbirth and he has been forced to abandon his infant daughter, Esperanza. Now, Sam is determined to reclaim his baby and take her to Meadowlark's village on the Wind River of Wyoming. In Santa Fe, Sam meets a beautiful widow known as Dona Paloma and the two become lovers. Then, after the herd of horses belonging to Sam and his companions are sold for a healthy profit, he returns to California to reunite with his daughter only to learn she has been taken captive in an Indian raid. Sam's desperate mission to rescue his daughter, their escape in a frail craft down a rampaging river, and their long trek to Santa Fe, is a harrowing tale told by a master of the historical novel.
Review
Praise for Win Blevins' Rendezvous Series:
"Blevins has done his research and knows the mountain men as well as anyone could--to read this tale is to get a true sense of what their ordeal and adventures must have been like...."--Library Journal on Dancing with the Golden Bear
"...a rousing installment in a fine epic of the American Frontier."
--Publisher's Weekly on Beauty for Ashes
"His gritty fiction brings to mind the fur-trading novels of Frederick Manfred (Lord Grizzly, 1954) and Vardis Fisher (Mountain Man).The glory years of frontier life, fresh and rich"--Kirkus Reviews on Beauty for Ashes
"Win Blevins' novel about venturesome Sam Morgan and the fur trade and mountain men of the 1820s is both authentic and entertaining. It will be a welcome addition to any collection of Western fiction."-- Dallas Morning News on So Wild a Dream
"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." -Booklist on So Wild a Dream
About the Author
Win Blevins is an authority on the Plains Indians and fur-trade era of the West. He is the author of
Give Your Heart to the Hawks and
Stone Song, his prize-winning novel of Crazy Horse. He has also authored such novels as
Charbonneau, Rock Child, and
RavenShadow, as well as the Rendezvous novels.
He lives in Utah with his wife Meredith, also a novelist.