Forthcoming Titles

Wind Walker

Final Volume in the Titus Bass Saga

The monumental saga of mountain man Titus Bass was first chronicled by award-winning author Terry C. Johnston in his best-selling trilogy of Carry the Wind, BorderLords, and One-Eyed Dream. In a second trilogy released a few years later--Dance on the Wind, Buffalo Palace, and Crack In the Sky--Johnston set down in heart-pounding detail the stirring adventures of Bass’s early life, three novels that bring the reader all the way from the frontier of Kentucky, when young Titus runs away from home, galloping west into the Rocky Mountains as this master storyteller sets the stage for the opening page of Carry the Wind.

Without a misstep, this unforgettable saga continued with Ride the Moon Down (which takes up where One-Eyed Dream left Scratch’s readers in suspense many years ago), then continued with Death Rattle. Now this epic trio of trilogies concludes with the story of this legendary hero’s autumn years. In this stunning climax to a landmark series destined to become an American classic, the final scenes promise to take your breath away as Bass, the hardy survivor of a frontier world quickly slipping into the past, prepares to fight his magnificent final battle--one last scene that is guaranteed to leave you with a lump in your throat and tears on your cheeks.

Fleeing the bloody aftermath of the Taos Rebellion, committed to taking his family as far away as he can from the madness of war and white men, Titus Bass heads north, hoping to spend what winters he has left among the Crow nation. But for Ol’ Scratch, this journey north turns out to be dramatically eventful. After saving an old friend from certain death, together they rescue Bass’s daughter, Magpie, from cut-throat Indian traders.

Already wagons filled with overland emigrants in search of new homes in the far west have already begun to rumble across the vast and once-untamed frontier. The wild and free world of the mountain man has become nothing more than a distant, fading glimmer by the time Bass and Shad Sweete settle in at a distant post on the Oregon Trail to help out their old friend, Jim Bridger.

In those earliest years of emigration, Bass must find a way to free a wagon train of innocent sod-busters from their unscrupulous leader and his band of violent toughs, young men prepared to enforce their leader’s every whim. Most important of all, Titus must come to terms with his long-lost daughter, Amanda, bound with her husband and their children for a new home in Oregon . . . a faraway land that Bass himself is content to leave to wayfarers and farmers.

Even Ol’ Gabe, whose post straddles the emigrants’ Oregon Trail, one day finds he must contend with Brigham Young and his Mormons, a group of followers who regard the entire region as their Promised Land to be cleansed of all non-believers. Brigham Young’s posse soon drives Bridger out, burns down his fort, and even murders some of Bass’s old friends in a bloody raid--all of it serving to confirm in Scratch’s heart that he has no choice but to take his family farther north, perhaps higher still . . . where the bloody deeds of land-hungry of despots and religious zealots will ever threaten them again.

But when he finally arrives in the land of the Crow, Titus Bass finds old friends--and old ways--dying out. Determined to live out his final years in peace among his wife’s people, Bass soon comes to realize that even on the changing frontier, old enemies still lie in wait, old dangers still lurk around the next bend in the trail, and survival will never be a certain thing.

Still to come in the final pages of this conclusion to the Titus Bass saga will be the greatest lesson a man can ever learn . . . that dearer by far than his own life are the lives of his friends and his loved ones.

"Only the rocks and the sky live long-- We who are warriors must one day die!"

Wind Walker, $24.95 in hardcover, available February, 2001.

Take this final ride with Titus Bass.

Turn the Stars Upside Down

The great warrior bands of the Northern Plains have splintered. Morning Star’s and Little Wolf’s Northern Cheyenne are already being herded south to the Hot Place in Indian Territory. Sitting Bull’s hold-outs are fleeing north across the Medicine Line into the Land of the Grandmother. And now the greatest war chief the Lakota people had ever known will reluctantly lead his people south to Red Cloud’s Agency, into an uncertain future . . .

Turn the Stars Upside Down

is the compelling and little-known story of Crazy Horse’s surrender scant months after his last fight with the U.S. Army at Battle Butte, his futile attempts to find peace for his warrior heart among the reservation Indians, and his eventual undoing at the hands of his own Oglala people.

For all his life this warrior has been a defender of the weak and helpless ones--but surrounded now on this tiny red island in a sea of white men, he finds himself powerless against the forces arrayed against him in what will ultimately be the last battle of his life, waged against army officers who lie when they promise him and his people their own reservation in their beloved Powder River country; even against the other leaders of his Oglala people who whisper, connive, and conspire behind his back to bring about his downfall. But even more disastrous and ultimately heartbreaking will be those friends who once fought at his side against the encroaching white tide . . . friends who now turn against him, joining his red enemies in their betrayal of this last great hero of the Lakota people--which brings about the realization of his medicine vision that he would one day meet his death while being held back by the hands of his own people.

Terry C. Johnston, America’s award-winning, best-selling frontier author, brings all his talent to bear on this tragic tale of betrayal with all the immediacy and poignant emotion he has so skillfully portrayed in thirty previous novels. No story of the Indian Wars would be complete without this final episode in the short life of Crazy Horse, this story of sinister betrayal . . . and the ultimate victory of one man’s warrior spirit.

Turn the Stars Upside Down, in hardcover, available August, 2001.