Joe Meek — mountain man, trapper, explorer, Indian fighter and pioneer — was instrumental in establishing the territorial government of Oregon and was appointed its first United States Marshal.

Joe was only nineteen when he ran away from his father's Virginia cotton plantation. Two of his brothers had already gone west and Joe caught up with them in St. Louis. Hiram was happily married and the owner of a grocery store, but Steve was a member of William Sublette's trapping expedition and this was what Joe wanted to do too. Sublette refused to take him because he was too young, so Joe stowed away as a mule boy and when he was discovered it was too late to send him back to St. Louis.

So began a life of incredible adventure — but young Joe thrived on it. He ranged the country of the Crow, the Blackfeet, the Flatheads, Diggers and the Nez Perces. He set his traps along the Big Horn, the Platte, the Snake the Yellowstone and the Columbia. He fought Indians, bears, starvation, the blizzards of the Rockies and the Salt Lake deserts.

His friends were the giants of the West who, like Joe himself, helped make history — Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, Jedediah Smith, Narcissa Whitman. He adored his Indian wife, Mountain Lamb, and their daughter, Helen Mar, but tragedy struck and one was killed in an Indian raid and the other in the Whitman massacre. Saddened, and enraged by encroaching civilization, Joe moved further west settling in the Northwest Territory which was dominated by the activities of the Hudson Bay Company and was under British rule. Many of the settlers wanted United States protection, and Joe Meek journeyed to Washington to petition for this aid. He returned with Joseph Lane, first Governor of the Oregon Territory, and was himself appointed first United States Marshal.

Joe Meek's story is more than the story of a man who loved mountains, it is the story of the making of a nation, and Shannon Garst has written it with all the zest and action, the vigor and violence that marked these mountain men.

From the dust jacket