So Wild a Dream (The Rendezvous Series) (Volume 1)

Into a West too untamed and uncharted for the explorers, came the mountain men. They blazed 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 feels too hemmed in. He cares nothing for commerce or industry. He nurtures a wild dream, that of 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. He sets off, and the adventure begins.

Along the way Sam finds companions and adventures. For guidance, an educated Delaware Indian and Captain William Clark himself. For friends, a con man, a madam, and an assortment of shaggy people 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 the love of a woman. From the Bois Brules, Snakes, Pawnees, and other tribes, he learns native crafts, lore, and mysticism.

But Sam's best 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.

This book won the 2004 Spur Award for Best Novel of the West and the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writer's award.

?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. Win Blevins has long since won his place among the West?s very best.??Tony Hillerman

?No one since the great A. B. Guthrie, Jr, has a better feel for the world of the mountain man.??Don Coldsmith

Blevins?s sweeping vision of the American frontier is just plain irresistible.? ?W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O?Neal Gear, authors of People of the Owl.