Perhaps being raised in the arid West accounts for my fascination with rivers and their courses. I was aware at an early age that farmers in the North Platte Valley prayed not for rain -- that was a lost cause -- but for snow in the Rockies to the west. Only the river would deliver the precious water to make their crops sprout green.

As I hiked around the foot of Scott's Bluff, following the ruts of the Oregon/California Trail, my eyes searched the ground for the arrowhead I felt destined to find. I climbed the sandstone bluff and looked east for Chimney Rock, pondering the long days it took rumbling wagons to get from there to here. I imagined how trapper Hiram Scott must have felt as his comrades walked away and left him to die alone. Did he call after them, I wondered? Did he curse? Did he weep? My mother took us east along the Burlington railroad tracks to feel the letters chiseled into an iron hoop marking a Mormon grave. Rebecca Winters, they read. What killed her I wondered, my childish mind conjuring up Indian arrows rather than debilitating cholera.

After I grew up and began writing, it was some time before my pencil began to fill my yellow pad with stories of these and other inhabitants of the West. But when I accompanied my son's Cub Scout troop 30 miles west to Fort Laramie, and heard for the first time the ironic, tragic story of the Grattan Massacre, I couldn't wait to learn all about it--to write about it. I knew I'd found my niche.

I searched out other incidents that happened along the Platte. A Spanish captain up from Santa Fe looked for the French until the Pawnees found him and ended his search forever. I extending my focus west and east, north and south, to the Sioux as well as the pioneers, to the artists as well as the trappers, to scientists, to missionaries, to the almost anonymous young man who strung telegraph wire.

Every one of them had a story. These stories became People of the Moonshell.
First book of the series

The book was successful and my publishers asked me to look at Missouri River history in a similar light. I began my research and my canvas enlarged. John Colter fled naked across what would become Montana prairie, the Blackfeet on his heels. Bear-slashed Hugh Glass crawled for a month of days before he could walk. A little Hidatsa girl lost her mother to small pox. A Mormon wife delivered her husband's second wife's baby. And then cared for the babe when the young mother died. People of the Troubled Water was born.

The frontier changed. While Sitting Bull earned his name, a fanatic in Kansas named John Brown fought slavery by butchering his neighbors. Captive Fanny Kelly survived a winter with the Sioux. Grant Marsh and his steamboat fought Missouri currents, and a black educator in Missouri taught black children to read. A paleontologist named Cope teetered on Montana cliffs chipping out dinosaur bones. Grant Marsh raced down-river with Reno's wounded. Teddy Roosevelt built a ranch and Jim Hill built a railroad. These and other stories became People of the Old Missury, Years of Conflict.

So many people. As I say in my preface to the book, "Thrown against each other like cottonwood trees caught in the violence of the raging river, some people of the Old Missury splintered and disintegrated; others, though battered and torn, rode through the flood. Their stories, as individual as their faces, remind us how the currents of history can catch us all and sweep us irresistibly in directions never contemplated."

I, too, am caught in the currents of history. It's a great ride!