The Yellowstone, Powder River, The Snake River, The High Missouri. I love rivers, loved to run them, and knew well that they were the highways of the men who truly opened the West, the fur trappers and their mixed blood children.
Bantam Books proposed an idea with juice. Find handful of good novelists. Let these writers create, separately, twenty or thirty novels that, together, would make a giant mosaic of stories of exploration.
I saw it as a challenge. The story of how the French fur men canoed, rode, and walked to the Great Lakes, then to the rivers that sprang from the northern Rockies, and at last all the way to the Arctic Ocean. And other half-known sagas.
I wrote four of the many books in the series, and through them, I was privileged to experience some of this great adventure. Join me, friends. — Win Blevins
