Ride the Moon Down

Terry C. Johnston is one of my favorite authors of historical fiction. His attention to detail in each of his novels is amazing and extremely factual. I recommend all of his books in each of his series without reservation. Once you start reading you can't put them down.

As rendevous re-enactors, we have found Johnston's works to be just truly amazing in their accuracy. We have purchased every book he has put out and we still keep looking for the next one! Had to have them shipped special while living overseas. A true master of the word and history of the West. Good on ya Terry - keep on writing! The Armstrong Clan

when I first read one of his books, I couldn't put down and finally met the author himself and bought the whole collection give or take a book. I'm sitting down and reading everyone, it's good for history lessons on what not to do now. I recommend his books for the lure of the mountains that terry johnston brings out, so fresh that you'd think you was living it. thanks terry for the goot, really goot readin'....jake bell, wind river indian reservation, wyoming 99'

Hard to believe it, but Terry C. Johnston just keeps getting better and better. Most writers who take on an extended series with one main character run out of gas about midway and get stale and cliched. This is Johnston's seventh Titus "Scratch" Bass novel, and he manages to keep it fresh, and keep us fans interested and caring in the character we have grown to love. He does this by avoiding the cliches, and steeping us in actual history melded perfectly with a crackling good yarn. Titus Bass is no fire-breathing bullet-proof dime novel hero. He is a flawed character, an everyman living in dangerous and changing times. Johnston fleshes out even minor characters, and the action scenes taut and exciting. The scene where Titus is ambushed by the Arapaho, and even gets a hand pinned to the saddle by an arrow is one of the best written fight sequences in print. And Johnston is more than an action writer, he gets to the meat of the times, giving you a history lesson through the perspective of one life affected by falling beaver prices, the end of the fur trade, the start of the settlement migration westward, the beginning of the decline of the Indians' free life on the plains. Those who haven't read Johnston, you are missing the best since Will Henry, maybe the greatest of them all. Get to know Johnston, and Titus Bass.

Titus Bass was older than most when he came to the mountains in 1825. He had already experienced life as a Kentucky settler's child, a flat boat crewman on the Ohio & Mississippi rivers and a blacksmith's apprentice in early Saint Louis. Nevertheless, when he arrived in the Shining Mountains, he found his true home. Living life hard and one day at a time, surviving catastrophe after catastrophe, he has persevered not because he is some kind of superman, but because he has that tenacity necessary to live beyond the edge of civilization, where one miscalculation can mean sudden, violent death. Scratch has survived devious and evil partners, attacks by Indians and grizzly bears, the dreaded smallpox and the indifferent cruelty of nature itself. He has been shot, stabbed, cudgeled; even scalped. He has lived this life to the fullest. Finding his pleasure where he can--in Taos with its alluring Mexican maidens, in the tipi of a willing squaw, in the whiskey and camaraderie of the annual summer rendezvous. Finally, after years of trapping beaver as a partner with other "free men"--trappers beholden to no company--Titus Bass has found love and joy in the arms of his beloved Crow wife, waits-by-the-Water and his two small children, daughter Magpie and son, Flea. Even as they dodge sudden death, sometimes narrowly, this family finds happiness in one another and in the raw beauty of this breath-taking land that is the Rocky Mountains.Now, after some fifteen years dodging death at the hands of Blackfeet, Arapaho, Sioux, even the harsh land itself, his forty-four-year-old body suffering the consequences of this harsh existence, Scratch and his family find themselves facing an enemy that even tenacity, courage and determination might not defeat. The beaver that have allowed Scratch and others--Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, Jedediah Smith--survive and prosper in this hostile land are fast becoming scarce. Higher and higher must the trappers search for unmolested streams where they can collect their plews. At the same time, tiny worm in China weaves silk and creates an alternative to the beaver to create hats for fashion-conscious Europeans and Easterners.Will Scratch be able to protect himself and his family from attacks by Blackfeet bent on revenge, the hate of his Crow brother-in-law, a devastating epidemic of small pox, the treachery of unscrupulous entrepreneurs bent on controlling the beaver trade, Sioux venturing into his territory and, perhaps the most terrifying event of all, the end of the beaver trade?The answer to that question is what will keep the reader glued to the pages of this chapter of the saga of Titus Bass. Excitement and danger loom on every page until the reader finally turns the last one. Even then, is the question answered....?The character of Titus Bass, as developed by author Terry C. Johnston, is not a hero in the classic sense, but by his very commonness looms large as an ordinary m