Skye's West

Barnaby Skye, a pressed seaman in the Royal Navy, jumps ship at Fort Vancouver in 1826 with little more than the clothes on his back and a belaying pin for a weapon. Fighting for life, starving, hiding from his pursuers-the Hudson's Bay Company and the British Navy-he follows the Columbia River inland toward a fate he never anticipated. In a trapping brigade, Skye falls in with legendary mountain men such as Jim Bridger and Tom "Broken Hand" Fitzpatrick and in the fabled Rocky Mountains finds another unexpected turn in his life when he meets the Crow maiden, Many Quill Woman, who will become his wife.

It is 1831 and Barnaby Skye, a deserter from the British Royal Navy and now a seasoned trapper in the Rocky Mountains, accompanies his Crow wife, Mary Quill Woman-whom he calls "Victoria"-to her village on the Yellowstone River. Victoria-unhappy with her husband's drinking and his unwillingness to join her people's fight against their sworn enemies, the Blackfeeet-succumbs to the entreaties of Jim Beckwourth, the much-honored and wealthy mulatto war chief of the Crow People. But when Victoria is abducted by the Bloods, the deadliest band of Blackfeet, Skye trails her across the border into Canada, where he is still wanted for deserting his ship at Fort Vancouver four years ago. But the Bloods are a deadly force, and Skye must face his fiercest battle ever to win her freedom and her heart. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

It is 1832, six years after he deserted the Royal Navy, when Barnaby Skye has a chance to return to England to clear his name and take up employment with the Hudson's Bay Company. But "Mister Skye," as he insists on being called, is as much a magnet for trouble as he is a legend among mountain men, and this opportunity of a lifetime begins to disintegrate almost from the moment it is presented to him. With his devoted Crow wife, Victoria, an eccentric botanist named Alistair Nutmeg, and a strange pariah dog following along, Skye makes his way west to Fort Vancouver in the Oregon country to begin his journey home. He is adept at dodging Blackfeet war parties and staving off starvation, but when the Hudson's Bay ship Cadboro makes a stopover in Mexican California, Skye's luck-generally bad to begin with-runs out. In Going Home, Skye fights Mexican bandits, murderous Pacific coastal Indians, thirst, starvation, and despair, as he learns where home really is and what honor really means. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Barnaby Skye, seaman-deserter from the Royal Navy, Rocky Mountain trapper, and frontiersman extraordinaire, brings his Crow Indian wife, Many Quill Woman (whom Skye calls "Victoria"), to the trappers' rendezvous on the Popo Agie River of Wyoming in the summer of 1838. There, he learns that the beaver-trapping business is dying out. When he is offered a chance to become a post trader in Victoria's homeland, he makes the journey to St. Louis to present himself as a candidate for the job to the mighty managers of the Upper Missouri Outfit. The 2,000-mile voyage down the Missouri River steamboat Otter is a lesson in survival to Skye and Victoria. The river offers dangers at every turn-but the real danger lies in another passenger on the paddlewheel steamer, the Creole fur brigade leader Alexandre Bonfils. This nefarious man, with influential relatives in St. Louis, is a rival for the job Skye is seeking and is determined to be the only candidate by the time the Otter reaches the city. Adding to Skye's problems is his rescue of a Cheyenne woman, Lame Deer, who needs to get to St. Louis to find her missing husband-a white man who has deserted her and their two children to marry into a prominent St. Louis family. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Barnaby Skye, the earthy deserter from the Royal Navy who has carved a career in the Rocky Mountains as a trapper, guide, and magnet for adventure, drifts south to Mexican territory with his Crow Indian wife, Many Quills Woman (or "Victoria," as he calls her), in this thirteenth and newest of the Skye chronicles. At Bent's Fort on the Mexican frontier, the Skyes agree to help a mysterious Cheyenne woman, Standing Alone, locate her two children who were kidnapped by Ute Indians several years before and sold into bondage in Mexico. The mission, impossible, dangerous, and foolhardy to all Skye's friends, takes the three to Santa Fe and Taos and into a strange association with an eccentric, self-proclaimed Texas adventurer and filibuster, Colonel Childress, who agrees to help them for reasons no one can guess. Childress has a wagon decorated with a Jolly Roger, an enormous Clydesdale horse, and a pet spider monkey named Shine, whose nimble talent for stealing food and performing for coins saves the lives of Skye and his party on several occasions. But neither the colonel nor his simian can prevent the inevitable consequences of an uninvited foray into forbidden territory. The party is robbed and left naked in the desert by Apaches; Skye is taken prisoner and sentenced to hang; Childress seems to be a traitor but rescues Victoria and Standing Alone, and is determined to find Skye and free him from his captors. The Deliverance is the thirteenth in a series of early American West frontier novels featuring Richard Wheeler's Barnaby Skye, the most beloved and enduring character in modern Western fiction. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Barnaby Skye, the most durable and unforgettable character in modern Western fiction, returns in this harrowing tale of survival from his early years in the Rockies. In the midst of a brutal winter, Skye's beloved Crow Indian wife, Victoria, is critically wounded when a Blackfeet raiding party attacks a Crow hunting camp. Despite Skye's attempts at doctoring, Victoria's life hangs in the balance as the two, left alone in the frozen wilderness, struggle to survive cold and starvation. Miraculously, an old mare and her foal wander into their camp. Victoria believes they have been sent by her spirit guide, and finds the strength to ride. Skye and his wife make their way toward Victoria's home village on the Musselshell River. Breaking winter trail is a slow and laborious process, but at the end of the journey, they will find peace. Or, will they? Skye's love of whiskey puts his life, and Victoria's, in peril when they encounter a renegade band of Yankee traders taking a wagonload of a cheap and poisonous raw alcohol to trade among the Indians. Their leader, a former West Point officer, forces Skye to guide them, but all the while, the legendary mountain man plots to ruin their deadly enterprise. In The Fire Arrow, Richard S. Wheeler has fashioned an unforgettable tale of love and survival in the unforgiving wilderness of the American West.

With the trapping trade on the decline, mountain man Barnaby Skye takes work as a guide, leading a wealthy Englishman, Graves Duplessis Mercer, and two companions on an exploration of the Yellowstone and Missouri River valleys. Mercer is a peculiar employer. He has come to the American wilderness seeking weird, morbid, thrilling, preferably slightly salacious, material to write up for British tabloids. He has little interest in such amazing natural phenomena as the geysers of the Yellowstone country but is adept in ferreting out stories of cannibalism and similar atrocities. To the Briton's disappointment, Skye has none of these to offer but does agree to take him to a Missouri River valley where gigantic bones of ancient monsters thrust out of canyon walls. Skye's Crow Indian wife, Victoria, warns that the bones are sacred among certain tribes, but Mercer insists on taking a "trophy" — a tooth from a tyrannosaurus-like fossil. This act nearly costs the lives of Mercer's party and its guide, Barnaby Skye. Wheeler's Barnaby Skye, a deserter from the Royal Navy who becomes a legendary mountain man, has been called "the Horatio Hornblower of the Rocky Mountains." At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

This is the sixteenth novel in Richard S. Wheeler's long-running series about Barnaby Skye, the British seaman who carves out an amazing life for himself in the North American Wilderness, along with his wives and his ugly, cantankerous horse, Jawbone. In Virgin River, the famed mountain man and his two wives, Victoria of the Crows and Mary of the Shoshones, take a party of tubercular young people to the southwestern desert where they hope to be healed. Their destination is the Virgin River, where the mild, dry climate offers a cure. This time, Skye and his wives must cope with rival guides and cross Utah at the time of heightened tensions between the federal government and the Latter-Day Saints. Skye soon discovers that other wagon companies on the trail fear the sick and blame them for every ill that overtakes their own companies. Taking a party of sick people along the California trail requires every bit of skill and courage that Skye and his wives can muster. And hovering over the trip is the looming catastrophe of war. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

There is a season for all things... For Barnaby Skye, legendary guide and man of the borders, it is time to start a new life. For Skye's younger wife, the beautiful Shoshone woman he calls Mary, it is time to find the beloved son she has not seen in seven years. For Skye's half-blood son, North Star, it is time to discover who he is. And for Skye's older Crow wife, Victoria, the whole world is spinning out of control. In this sweeping novel of the early West, Skye and his wives and son cope with radical change as the wilderness vanishes, the buffalo are slaughtered, and the government puts the tribes on reservation lands. How can people born and bred to tribal life learn to live another way? Their struggle takes the Skyes from the Crazy Mountains in Montana to St. Louis and the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, wrestling with the tide of settlers and the new settlements that dot the western plains and mountains - a tide that leaves no good place for a veteran borders man with two Indian wives and a mixed-blood son. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

The First Dance takes beloved mountain man Barnaby Skye's family to its third generation in North America. Miles City, Montana. 1885. Barnaby Skye's mixed-blood son, Dirk, has just married a beautiful Metis girl, Therese. But Dirk's position as a civilian translator for the U.S. army threatens to shatter their union. Montana ranchers wrestling with livestock theft and the incursion of settlers into their range have persuaded the army to send the Metis people back to Canada. The military enlists Dirk to translate between the two sides in the brutal campaign. Unable to reconcile her love for Dirk with the pain he is inflicting on her people, Therese flees on their wedding night. Heartbroken, Dirk rides off with the army. Therese has a powerful vision. She is inspired to build a church that will be a gathering place for her people and a symbol of their resistance to deportation. The suffering refugees-driven into the wilderness by Yankee soldiers and cruel ranch vigilante gangs-find a friend in Dirk and an inspiration in Therese. In their common cause, the lovers are reunited At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.