There is a season for all things. . . For Barnaby Skye, legendary guide and man of the borders, it is time to start a new life. For Skye's younger wife, the beautiful Shoshone woman he calls Mary, it is time to find the beloved son she has not seen in seven years. For Skye's half-blood son, North Star, it is time to discover who he is. And for Skye's older Crow wife, Victoria, the whole world is spinning out of control. In this sweeping novel of the early West, Skye and his wives and son cope with radical change as the wilderness vanishes, the buffalo are slaughtered, and the government puts the tribes on reservation lands. How can people born and bred to tribal life learn to live another way? Their struggle takes the Skyes from the Crazy Mountains in Montana to St. Louis and the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, wrestling with the tide of settlers and the new settlements that dot the western plains and mountains - a tide that leaves no good place for...

Sheriff Blue Smith hopes to spend his remaining days at his favorite fishing hole. He's slow and his eyesight is not good, but he presides over a peaceful county. But then he finds the body of a stranger at his fishing hole, and soon discovers that someone is fishing for old Blue. And it proves to be someone he knows, someone who wants to hurt Blue and his family. The old sheriff's up against a ruthless younger man, and all Blue has going for him is an understanding of human nature. He hopes that's enough.

Barnaby Skye, the earthy deserter from the Royal Navy who has carved a career in the Rocky Mountains as a trapper, guide, and magnet for adventure, drifts south to Mexican territory with his Crow Indian wife, Many Quills Woman (or "Victoria," as he calls her), in this thirteenth and newest of the Skye chronicles.At Bent's Fort on the Mexican frontier, the Skyes agree to help a mysterious Cheyenne woman, Standing Alone, locate her two children who were kidnapped by Ute Indians several years before and sold into bondage in Mexico. The mission, impossible, dangerous, and foolhardy to all Skye's friends, takes the three to Santa Fe and Taos and into a strange association with an eccentric, self-proclaimed Texas adventurer and filibuster, Colonel Childress, who agrees to help them for reasons no one can guess.Childress has a wagon decorated with a Jolly Roger, an enormous Clydesdale horse, and a pet spider monkey named Shine, whose nimble talent for stealing food...

With the trapping trade on the decline, mountain man Barnaby Skye takes work as a guide, leading a wealthy Englishman, Graves Duplessis Mercer, and two companions on an exploration of the Yellowstone and Missouri River valleys. Mercer is a peculiar employer. He has come to the American wilderness seeking weird, morbid, thrilling, preferably slightly salacious, material to write up for British tabloids. He has little interest in such amazing natural phenomena as the geysers of the Yellowstone country but is adept in ferreting out stories of cannibalism and similar atrocities.To the Briton's disappointment, Skye has none of these to offer but does agree to take him to a Missouri River valley where gigantic bones of ancient monsters thrust out of canyon walls. Skye's Crow Indian wife, Victoria, warns that the bones are sacred among certain tribes, but Mercer insists on taking a "trophy" - a tooth from a tyrannosaurus-like fossil. This act nearly costs the lives of...

When Buffalo Bill Cody died in 1917, he was the best-known person on earth. But the world wasn't done with him. In this richly wrought novel, Richard Wheeler depicts the struggle to commandeer his remains for commercial purposes.The owner of the Denver Post, Harry Tammen, wanted to bury him outside of Denver, as a tourist attraction. Cody wanted to be buried in his namesake town, Cody, Wyoming. His estranged wife Louisa had other ideas, and so did his sisters. So did Cody's friends. The result was a gaudy free-for-all, in which Tammen prevailed, and the old scout was finally buried on Lookout Mountain, outside of Denver.The author gives us a telling look at the sycophants and connivers who surrounded the showman. He paints a tender portrait of the old man, who was besieged by a lot of people with a lot of schemes. Cody had many friends, including Annie Oakley and Sitting Bull, who remembered the old man fondly, and these people, too, have their say in this penetrating and...

The enchanting story of a vaudeville troupe that makes its way to Western mining towns, from reknowned master of the Western novel, Richard S. Wheeler.The cowboys, gold miners, outlaws, gunmen, prostitutes, and marshals who populate the Wild West never see much big-city entertainment. Those Western towns are too wild and rowdy for entertainers to enter, let alone perform in them. All that is about change. August Beausoleil and his colleague, Charles Pomerantz, have taken the Beausoleil Brothers Follies to the remote mining towns of Montana, far from the powerful impresarios who own the talent and control the theaters on the big vaudeville circuits. Their cast includes a collection of has-beens and second-tier performers: Mary Mabel Markey, once queen of the boards but now a little out of breath; Wayne Windsor, "The Profile," who favors his audiences with just one side of his face while needling them with acerbic dialogue; Harry the Juggler, who went from tossing...

Two stories of renowned American explorers in one low-priced edition, from master of the western novel Richard S. WheelerSnowboundAmerican explorer John Frémont embarks on a quest to find a railway route to the west along the 38th parallel. His fourth expedition, into the American west in the dead of winter, proves more challenging than anticipated. Trapped, snowbound, in the Colorado mountains, Frémont must battle the frigid elements in a harrowing journey over the backbone of the continent. This novel of desperate danger and fierce courage is a survival saga par excellence—a struggle of man against man, man against nature, and man against himself.EclipseLewis and Clark made history with their epochal first crossing of the North American continent. Upon their return, plain-spoken William Clark enjoys his fame, marries his childhood sweetheart, and settles in St. Louis as superintendent of the nation's...

The First Dance takes beloved mountain man Barnaby Skye's family to its third generation in North America. Miles City, Montana. 1885. Barnaby Skye's mixed-blood son, Dirk, has just married a beautiful Metis girl, Therese. But Dirk's position as a civilian translator for the U.S. army threatens to shatter their union. Montana ranchers wrestling with livestock theft and the incursion of settlers into their range have persuaded the army to send the Metis people back to Canada. The military enlists Dirk to translate between the two sides in the brutal campaign. Unable to reconcile her love for Dirk with the pain he is inflicting on her people, Therese flees on their wedding night. Heartbroken, Dirk rides off with the army.Therese has a powerful vision. She is inspired to build a church that will be a gathering place for her people and a symbol of their resistance to deportation.The suffering...

It is 1831 and Barnaby Skye, a deserter from the British Royal Navy and now a seasoned trapper in the Rocky Mountains, accompanies his Crow wife, Mary Quill Woman—whom he calls "Victoria"—to her village on the Yellowstone River. Victoria—unhappy with her husband's drinking and his unwillingness to join her people's fight against their sworn enemies, the Blackfeeet—succumbs to the entreaties of Jim Beckwourth, the much-honored and wealthy mulatto war chief of the Crow People.But when Victoria is abducted by the Bloods, the deadliest band of Blackfeet, Skye trails her across the border into Canada, where he is still wanted for deserting his ship at Fort Vancouver four years ago. But the Bloods are a deadly force, and Skye must face his fiercest battle ever to win her freedom and her heart.

Barnaby Skye, the most durable and unforgettable character in modern Western fiction, returns in this harrowing tale of survival from his early years in the Rockies. In the midst of a brutal winter, Skye's beloved Crow Indian wife, Victoria, is critically wounded when a Blackfeet raiding party attacks a Crow hunting camp. Despite Skye's attempts at doctoring, Victoria's life hangs in the balance as the two, left alone in the frozen wilderness, struggle to survive cold and starvation.Miraculously, an old mare and her foal wander into their camp. Victoria believes they have been sent by her spirit guide, and finds the strength to ride. Skye and his wife make their way toward Victoria's home village on the Musselshell River. Breaking winter trail is a slow and laborious process, but at the end of the journey they will find peace. Or will they? Skye's love of whiskey puts his life, and Victoria's, in peril when they encounter a renegade band of Yankee traders...

It is 1832, six years after he deserted the Royal Navy, when Barnaby Skye has a chance to return to England to clear his name and take up employment with the Hudson's Bay Company. But "Mister Skye," as he insists on being called, is as much a magnet for trouble as he is a legend among mountain men, and this opportunity of a lifetime begins to disintegrate almost from the moment it is presented to him.With his devoted Crow wife, Victoria, an eccentric botanist named Alistair Nutmeg, and a strange pariah dog following along, Skye makes his way west to Fort Vancouver in the Oregon country to begin his journey home.He is adept at dodging Blackfeet war parties and staving off starvation, but when the Hudson's Bay ship Cadboro makes a stopover in Mexican California, Skye's luck-generally bad to begin with-runs out. In Going Home, Skye fights Mexican bandits, murderous Pacific coastal Indians, thirst, starvation, and despair, as he learns where home really...

Barnaby Skye, seaman-deserter from the Royal Navy, Rocky Mountain trapper, and frontiersman extraordinaire, brings his Crow Indian wife, Many Quill Woman (whom Skye calls "Victoria"), to the trappers' rendezvous on the Popo Agie River of Wyoming in the summer of 1838. There, he learns that the beaver-trapping business is dying out. When he is offered a chance to become a post trader in Victoria's homeland, he makes the journey to St. Louis to present himself as a candidate for the job to the mighty managers of the Upper Missouri Outfit.The 2,000-mile voyage down the Missouri River steamboat Otter is a lesson in survival to Skye and Victoria. The river offers dangers at every turn--but the real danger lies in another passenger on the paddlewheel steamer, the Creole fur brigade leader Alexandre Bonfils. This nefarious man, with influential relatives in St. Louis, is a rival for the job Skye is seeking and is determined to be the only candidate by the time the Otter...

Major Marcus Reno is a controversal figure, a man accused of being responsible for the worst disaster ever to befall the army of the United States. He had been one of George Armstrong Custer's senior officers when Custer and over 200 men in his command were annihilated by Sioux and Cheyenne warriors above the Little Big Horn River in Montana Territory.While declared by his superiors innocent of wrong-doing in the terrible battle, Marcus Reno's honor -the most precious word in his vocabulary - was blackened in the press and by his fellow officers and other Custer idolators. For thirteen years Reno has lived with this stain on his reputation. Now, with time running out, suffering from painful cancer, Reno wants his honor restored. He arranges to give a final newspaper interview to New York Herald correspondent Joseph Richler. Richler, captivated by this officer and gentleman, promises the dying Major that he will write the whole story of Reno's conduct in...

This is the sixteenth novel in Richard S. Wheeler's long-running series about Barnaby Skye, the British seaman who carves out an amazing life for himself in the North American Wilderness, along with his wives and his ugly, cantankerous horse, Jawbone. In Virgin River, the famed mountain man and his two wives, Victoria of the Crows and Mary of the Shoshones, take a party of tubercular young people to the southwestern desert where they hope to be healed. Their destination is the Virgin River, where the mild, dry climate offers a cure. This time, Skye and his wives must cope with rival guides and cross Utah at the time of heightened tensions between the federal government and the Latter-Day Saints.Skye soon discovers that other wagon companies on the trail fear the sick and blame them for every ill that overtakes their own companies. Taking a party of sick people along the California trail requires every bit of skill and courage that Skye and his wives can muster....

Barnaby Skye, a pressed seaman in the Royal Navy, jumps ship at Fort Vancouver in 1826 with little more than the clothes on his back and a belaying pin for a weapon. Fighting for life, starving, hiding from his pursuers--the Hudson's Bay Company and the British Navy--he follows the Columbia River inland toward a fate he never anticipated. In a trapping brigade, Skye falls in with legendary mountain men such as Jim Bridger and Tom "Broken Hand" Fitzpatrick and in the fabled Rocky Mountains finds another unexpected turn in his life when he meets the Crow maiden, Many Quill Woman, who will become his wife.At the publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied.