by Win Blevins
Author’s Note
BEAUTY FOR ASHES is the second novel of the Rendezvous Series, which tells the story of the fur trade in the American West during its glory years, from the early 1820s to the late 1830s. It is an adventure tale and a love story told against a background that is scrupulously researched.
Most of the characters around Sam Morgan are historical. William Ashley, Jedediah Smith, Jim Beckwourth, Tom Fitzpatrick, James Clyman, and many others are characterized as the record shows them. Aside from Sam, the main fictional characters are the Crow characters, Gideon, Third Wing, and Micajah.
The fur trade, its conditions and circumstances, the landscape, the Indian peoples, and so on are also drawn carefully from the record. The struggles and subsequent success of the Ashley firm were just as suggested here. I have described the first and second rendezvous from accounts of men who were there. Ashley’s instructions on how to find the meeting place (complete with “pealed trees”), for instance, is as he wrote it; Daniel Potts’s letter telling his brother about the second rendezvous is what he actually penned.
My hope is to create, over the entire series, an authentic picture of a particularly splendid time in America, even more full of danger, conflict, wild possibility, villainy, cowardice, heroism, tragedy, and joy than most eras in American history.
A final note: Money was very different in the 1820s. A profit of $50,000 then may be the equivalent of a couple of million dollars now. The $1.50 a trapper paid for a pound of coffee was wages for a day or two back in the States.
Most of the unfamiliar words the mountain men use here are defined in the glossary in the first novel in the series, So Wild a Dream.
Also by Win Blevins
Stone Song
The Rock Child
ravenShadow
Give Your Heart to the Hawks
RENDEZVOUS SERIES
So Wild a Dream
Beauty for Ashes
Dancing with the Golden Bear
Heaven Is a Long Way Off
A Long and Winding Road
Dreams Beneath Your Feet
Acknowledgments
FOR THE MATERIAL on the Crow people, thanks to my friends among the Crows, especially the men of medicine, Larsen and Tyler Medicine Horse. I also relied on the bible about Crow culture, Robert Lowie’s The Crow Indians. I have relied for the doings of the mountain men particularly on two fine books, Dale L. Morgan’s Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the West and Fred R. Gowans’s Rocky Mountain Rendezvous.
Thanks to Jan Blevins, Richard Hoyt, and others who provided crucial information.
My editor, Dale Walker, is a rock.
The Honorable Clyde Hall, man of medicine of the Shoshone people, has acted as my mentor for twenty years. Thank you, Clyde.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
BEAUTY FOR ASHES
Copyright © 2004 by Win Blevins
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
Map by Mark Stein Studios
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Blevins, Winfred.
Beauty for ashes / Win Blevins.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Sequel to: So wild a dream.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-0333-6
1. Trappers—Fiction. 2. Indian captivities—Fiction. 3. Rocky Mountains—Fiction. 4. Mountain life—Fiction. 5. Crow women—Fiction. 6. Fur trade—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3552.L45B43 2004
813'.54—dc22
2004047160