Eighteen years have passed since Sam Morgan came West from Pennsylvania and learned the perilous business of trapping in the wilderness of the Rocky Mountains.Now, in 1840, he seems to face a bleak future. The fur trade has played out and he must find other means of making a living.Sam decides to return to California with his daughter Esperanza and start a new life. The great golden land represents a bitter memory — his beloved Crow Indian wife Meadowlark died there in childbirth — but friends convince him that his destiny lies on the Pacific shore.Meadowlark's uncle, Flat Dog, his family, and Hannibal MacKye, the half-Delaware mountain man, join Sam and Esperanza for the journey west, where they hope to trade for a herd of Appaloosa horses to sell at a profit in California.At Fort Hall on the Oregon Trail, Sam and his people encounter a terrified woman, Lei Palua, who has...

When Navajo detective Yazzie Goldman sees a hood hassling an old man, he has no idea what a long fall into trouble it heralds.The old man turns out to be none other than the most famous architect in the world, Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright e is carrying the sketches for his most important building, the Guggenheim Museum. Some bad people are after him: A Chicago gangster wants Wright to pay back money he's borrowed. One of Wright's apprentices wants to steal the drawings and sell them. So does the son of the gangster.Yazzie agrees to protect Wright. In the process he brings the architect into his Santa Fe home, endangering his family. John Ford is shooting a movie in Monument Valley, and luckily, the star of the movie, John Wayne, helps Yazzie ride against the bad guys.Ending in a startling confrontation, Win Blevins and Meredith Blevins's Stealing Fire is a thriller of psychology, Navajo mysticism, and murder.

Trapping beaver was the major source of income for mountain men in the Rocky Mountain West of the 1820s -- the luxuriant, sought-after pelts could make a man rich. But it was a dangerous way to make a living: winter blizzards, hostile Indians, sickness, and starvation lurked at every point of the compass. Only a special brand of man could survive it all.After making a harrowing 700-mile journey alone and on foot from the Sweetwater River in Wyoming to Fort Atkinson on the Missouri River and finding a home in the fur trade, young Sam Morgan is becoming just such a man. Followed closely by Coy, his faithful coyote pup, and trapping with a brigade of mountain men, Sam seeks more than furs and wealth. He is searching for the love of his life, the Crow Indian woman Meadowlark, and with his companions -- the French-Canadian Gideon Dubois, the mulatto Jim Beckwourth, and the Pawnee Third Wing -- he heads for the Wind River country and the village of Meadowlark's...

A rock star finds adventure, love, music, healing, and life in Win Blevins and Meredith Blevins' Moonlight Water.Robbie, a San Francisco area musician, half burned out on his career, is blind-sided by his wife's miscarriage and a painful divorce. Devastated, he has a visionary experience which tantalizes him with the possibility of an entirely new life. He sets out to wander America by car to find what his money couldn't buy. Robbie stumbles upon his new life in an unlikely place, among the Navajos. There, he falls in love with a ranger and helps her track down looters that are threatening area artifacts, becomes welcomed into the community, and finds the most valuable artifact of all...himself. Moonlight Water is the story of the redemption of a shipwrecked life through challenge, courage, and love.At the publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied.

High jinks, close calls, and adventures worthy of Don Quixote abound in this light-hearted romp through the West from Win Blevins, winner of the Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Contributions to Western Literature Shakespeare, a former actor of gargantuan proportions, and his sidekick, Silk, a rail-thin teenager with all the brains that Shakespeare lacks, are two of the most improbable mountain men ever to explore the Rocky Mountains. Together, they get into flabbergasting scrapes, from wrestling bears to falling in love with off-limits women in Santa Fe. Silk and Shakespeare are fictional, but they ride alongside real historical figures such as Antelope Jim Beckwourth, the biracial son of a Virginia plantation owner who became a warrior chief of the Crow Indians, and his lover, Pine Leaf, a legendary woman warrior. This unlikely foursome gets into jams with dreaded enemies of the Crow and the Blackfeet—but that's to be expected of characters who,...

A love story unfolds during the dramatic journey of the determined Cheyenne people from Indian Territory back to their Montana homeland and the mighty Powder River The northern Cheyenne still call the Powder River country their sacred home. But now, held captive far to the south in so-called Indian Territory, the remnants of this once-mighty nation are growing feeble and dying. To survive, they must battle their way across fifteen hundred miles to their ancestral home, fending off pursuit by thousands of well-armed soldiers. Among the outnumbered band are Adam Smith Maclean, born both white and Cheyenne, and his wife, Elaine, a New Englander determined to stand by Adam and his desperate, daring Cheyenne family. Together they embark on the arduous trek through the hostile heart of the white man's West toward the welcoming banks of the Powder River.

The epic story of Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau, son of Sacajawea, and his quest to unite the two worlds in which he was raised: posh European society and the mystic American wilderness The son of two of Lewis and Clark's guides—Sacajawea and a French Canadian fur trapper—Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau was born during one of the greatest adventures in American history. With the support of William Clark, he grew up in the well-to-do society of St. Louis and eventually made his way to Europe, where he became the welcome guest of kings. But Charbonneau was a man of two dreams, and the Western wilderness pulled at his heart. It was there that he returned as a nineteenth-century mountain man, trader, and explorer. Charbonneau is a moving novel based on the fundamental conflict in the American West during the first half of the nineteenth century: the clash of values between the white man and the American Indian. In the great...

Upon his return from World War II, Seaman Yazzie Goldman realizes that not much has changed at his family's trading post in Monument Valley—and yet everything is different. His grandfather, Moses Goldman, has suffered a debilitating stroke, and while Yazzie's mother Nizhoni is doing her best, the post is slowly falling apart. Nizhoni is thrilled that Yazzie has returned to help bring the trading post back to prosperity. Excitement comes from the nearby filming of a John Ford movie starring Henry Fonda. Director Ford enlists the tall, strong, half-Navajo and half-Jewish Yazzie to serve as a translator, and as a bodyguard for the beautiful actress Linda Darnell. Someone is sending Linda threatening letters, and as Yazzie investigates, he finds himself falling for her. Yazzie isn't the only one to have recently returned home. A man who calls himself Zopilote, the Buzzard, has spent the last twenty-five years in jail steeping himself in the ancient Navajo chant...

A brave son of Ireland embarks on the adventure of a lifetime in this tale of the men and women mad enough to take on one of the wildest rivers in the West In the nineteenth century, those who followed the treacherous, sidewinding course of the Snake River were carried to some of the most beautiful country on earth: the untouched Pacific Northwest. Flare O'Flaherty—son of Ireland, mountain trapper, and gambler—sets out on this incredible journey when he agrees to lead a group of missionaries downriver to the remote headquarters of the mighty Hudson's Bay Company. Along the way, he faces the greatest challenge of a wandering man's lifetime in the form of Margaret Jewel, an extraordinary woman who teaches Indian children. He also meets a young Shoshone, Sima, in search of the white father he never knew. Together they find their destiny along the mighty river that bears the shape of a serpent and holds the promise of home.

From a two-time Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers Writer of the Year, this tale of lost faith and crowning redemption follows one American Indian's spirit journey to heal his past and claim his future Before he was born, Joseph Blue Crow was chosen to carry the sacred ways of the Sioux. But instead of walking the good Red Road of his people, he put his feet on the white man's road of basketball and booze, women and the blues. Haunted by the loss of his Lakota heritage and the inexplicable suicide of the woman he loves, Blue sinks into alcoholism and despair. He soon finds himself on the precipice of oblivion, a train roaring toward his car on the railroad tracks. Only his best friend's words can save him: "You got to go on the mountain." Blue's journey takes him on a tortuous path, guided by a shaman and a spirit bird under whose wing lies the shadow of the past. He relives the massacre of Wounded Knee, standing beside his...

A spiritual quest turns into a frontier adventure in this gripping installment in Western Writers Hall of Fame author Win Blevins's breathtaking series about the discovery of America's Northern rivers and mountains They came from civilization to wilderness, from the way of the Cross to the Path of the Sacred Pipe, from the wisdom of Europe to the experience of raw, dangerous, exhilarating life in the American wilderness. Among them is an innocent named Dylan Campbell. A would-be priest, Dylan signs up with the Nor'West Company to bring God to the Indians. But as he travels across the awesome plains of the West and up the mighty rivers hurtling down from the mountains, Dylan discovers worlds beyond all expectation. He encounters a mystical wanderer called the Druid and witnesses frightening acts of violence and carnality as well as paths of beauty and enlightenment beyond all imagining. At Fort Augustus, a beautiful woman teaches Dylan...

Winner of the Spur Award and a nominee for the Pulitzer Prize: This classic tale of the West has been heralded by the Dallas Morning News as "a deeply spiritual story about the soul journey of a great and mysterious American hero" Of all the iconic figures of Native American history, Crazy Horse remains the most mysterious. Ridiculed as a boy for his unusual looks, he grew up to be a man who had no interest in the regalia that his fellow Lakota Sioux warriors coveted, and yet he led his people to their most famous victory: the defeat of General Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Called to a destiny of monumental significance and tortured by his deeply passionate love of a beautiful woman, Crazy Horse found peace only in battle. A visionary who drew inspiration from the eternal wisdom of his people, he discovered the means to defeat the US Army at its own deadly game. To this day, he strides across American history as a man who...

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...