Terry C. Johnston

Sixteen-year-old Titus Bass fears one fate more than any other: never to experience the great wilderness or the wildness inside himself. So late one night he snatches a squirrel gun and a handful of biscuits, flees into the woods, and doesn’t look back.

The wild and free world of the mountain man is quickly fading into the past. For Titus Bass, leading his family north to winter with the Crow people, the journey is a sad one. He must save an old friend from death and rescue his daughter Magpie from cutthroat traders.

High in the Rockies lay the Bayou Salade, a lush beaver-rich valley so untouched that the few white men who had seen it called it paradise. But for Scratch Bass, his young partner Josiah Paddock, and the two Indian women they loved, this paradise would open up a hell of violence....

Young Josiah Paddock, on the run from his past in St. Louis, didn’t have much hope of survival. Winter was coming to the Rockies, and if the cold cutting through his city clothes didn’t kill him, grizzlies or Indians would....

This historically accurate tale describes one of the worst military disasters ever suffered by the U.S. Army on the Great Plains.

They had settled a bloody score and put the turncoat McAfferty to rest in the snowbound Rockies. Slowly, painfully, the wounded Paddock and Scratch found their way back to the Crow village, where they were welcomed as brother and son....

Drawn by the promise of adventure and wealth, Titus Bass joins an expedition to Spanish California, where the ranchos have horses and mules in abundance. Their plan is to steal the livestock and drive it back east across the great Mojave Desert to sell to fur traders for top dollar.

The time of the mountain man is coming to an end, but some, like Titus Bass, will not exit gently. A brilliantly exciting and thoroughly researched novel of the end of the dream that was the unmapped and virgin wilderness in the American West, starring the king of the mountain men, Titus Bass.

Crack in the Sky continues the development of the young Titus Bass as he gradually learns the lore of the mountain man.

In Buffalo Palace, the young Titus Bass sights and then sets out into the vast Rocky Mountain country.