So Wild a Dream (Rendezvous)

Rating:
Summary: An adventure of the body and the spirit
Review: A young man, Sam, follows the call to adventure given him by a Delaware Indian sitting by a mighty river. During his journey Sam learns love, fighting, the ways of Indians and the songs of mountains and rivers. But more than this, Sam learns his own heart, his strengths, his hopes and his fears. SO WILD A DREAM is a real page-turner packed with adventure. It's also a beautiful and poetic story of a spiritual adventure learned through trials and triumphs. Win Blevins once again creates a rich world with all the juicy stuff of living. A must read.

Rating:
Summary: A story of amazing courage, endurance, and resourcefulness
Review: The first volume in the Rendezvous Series, So Wild a Dream is a thoroughly enjoyable tale of struggle and survival in the wilderness of the Great American West in the early 19th century.

The time is 1822. The protagonist is Sam Morgan, 18, who, bored with civilization and "following his wild hair," leaves his home in Morgantown, twenty miles up the Allegheny River from Pittsburgh, and sets out on an adventurous trek toward the Shining Mountains of his dreams.

In Part One, "Venturing Forth," Sam travels on a flatboat down the Ohio to Cincinnati, Louisville, and Evansville, and up the Mississippi to St. Louis. He meets colorful characters (card sharks, con men, flimflam artists), visits shady places (taverns, booze dens, gambling halls, cathouses), and experiences barroom brawls and a mugging.

In Part Two, "Indian Country," Sam enters alien territory, where people are no longer "civilized" but are "savages," although Sam wonders if there is any real difference between the two.

Stalking that wily rodent, the beaver, Sam and his fellow fur traders meet Native Americans of various tribes, some friendly, some hostile: the Crow, the Sioux, the Cheyenne, the Snake, the Blackfeet, the Rees, the Bois Brules, and the Pawnee.

Sam falls in love with Meadowlark, a beautiful young Crow woman of the Gray Hawk family. The romance is cut short, however, when the expedition pushes on westward, where the voyagers face starvation in the snow-covered mountains and desperate combat with Indian warriors.

Part Three, "The Journey," is the best part of Blevins' tale. Separated from his companions, Sam struggles to rejoin civilization on a seven-week, seven-hundred-mile trek back to Fort Atkinson on the Missouri River. Along the way he finds a "bosom buddy" (literally) in Coy, a coyote pup, who shows him the only escape from the holocaust of a prairie fire.

Emerging from his baptism of ice and fire, the man who came to the end of the journey was not the same man who started out. Sam had become a mountain man, a man who, in Part Four, "The Return," is virtually a stranger to his family and friends.

So Wild a Dream is a story of amazing courage, endurance, and resourcefulness. To use Mr. Blevins' language, if I "know fat cow from poor bull," this novel is a winner; "it shines."

Win Blevins is an authority on the Plains Indians and the fur-trade era of the West. His rollicking tribute to the mountain man, Give Your Heart to the Hawks, remains in print thirty years after its first publication; his novel of Crazy Horse, Stone Song, earned several prestigious literary prizes; and such novels as Charbonneau, The Rock Child, and Raven Shadow have established him as among the best of writers of the West. He lives in Utah's Canyonlands with his wife, Meredith, also a novelist.

Roy E. Perry of Nolensville, Tennessee, is an advertising copywriter at a Nashville publishing house.