So Wild a Dream by Win Blevins

So Wild a Dream by Win Blevins

Blevins possesses a rare skill in masterfully telling a story-to-paper. He is a true storyteller in the tradition of Native people.--Lee Francis, Professor of Native American Studies, University of New Mexico

Into the untamed West came the mountain men. They explored the wilderness, crossed the Rocky Mountains, learned the ways of Indian tribes, trekked to the Pacific, and became the stuff of legends. In SO WILD A DREAM, first book of the Rendezvous series, we meet young Sam Morgan. Sam has a hungry spirit and is pulled by the lure of adventure.

In 1822, life in Pennsylvania feels hemmed in, and Sam nurtures the dream of a truly free American life. Since the return of Captains Lewis and Clark, people are bubbling with stories about the far-off Shining Mountains. Sam gets a job on a riverboat, and the adventure begins.

Along the way he 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 River. On route, he survives the holocaust of a prairie fire and learns the price of survival in the pitiless Western wilds. Sam also learns something of who he is and of who he wants to become.

SO WILD A DREAM was chosen by Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers as novel of the year. It also won the Spur award for best novel of the West.p>

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.

I came naturally by my yen to wander far places, physical, imaginary, and spiritual...-Win Blevins Win Blevins, of Cherokee, Irish and Welsh descent, is from a family that was on the move, always west. Win's childhood was spent roaming, his dad a railroad man. Win went to school in St. Louis, and the family spent summers in little towns along the tracks of the railroads. He listened to the whistles blow at night and wanted to go wherever the trains went.
Seldom has a young man been in more of a hurry. Using scholarships, Win ran through a succession of colleges, receiving his master's degree, with honors, in English from Columbia University. He taught at Purdue University and Franklin College, then received a fellowship to attend USC. Win became a newspaperman - a music, theater, and film critic for both major Los Angeles papers. In 1972 he took the big leap-he quit his job to write out his passions-exploring and learning wild places-full time. His greatest passion of all has been to set the stories of these places, their people and animals, colors and smells, into books.
Win climbed mountains for ten years. A fluke blizzard caught him on a mountaintop and froze his feet, an end to climbing mountains, but not to exploring them. He's rafted rivers in the west, particularly the Snake and the San Juan, and was briefly a river guide. His love of the great Yellowstone River gave him a fine appreciation for the people who first loved these wild places. Along the way, Win lost the use of his legs and learned to sail, deciding a boat was a good place for a man without legs. He regained the use of his legs, and maintains his love of the open seas.
His first book, Give Your Heart to the Hawks, is still in print after thirty years. Other works include Stone Song, a novel about Crazy Horse, for which he won the 1996 Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award and the 1996 Spur Award. He's written 15 books, including a Dictionary of the American West, numerous screenplays and magazine articles.
He lives quietly in the canyon country of Utah. His passions grow with time-his wife Meredith, the center of his life, their five kids and grandkids. Classical music, baseball, roaming red rock mesas in the astonishing countryside, playing music... He considers himself blessed to be one of the people creating new stories about the west, and is proud to call himself a member of the world's oldest profession-storyteller.