The Big Sky

Boone Caudill runs away from a Kentucky farm in 1830 after fighting his father, and lights out for St. Louis to find his uncle. He falls in with the seasoned mountain man Dick Summers and the moody redhead Jim Deakins, and the three of them spend the next 13 years trapping beaver up the Missouri into Blackfoot country, taking a Blackfoot wife, fighting other trappers, and watching the wilderness they came west to find disappear under their own boots. Guthrie writes the slow collapse of the fur-trade era from the inside, building the mountain-man epic that became the foundation of literary western fiction.