Barnaby Skye, a pressed seaman in the Royal Navy, jumps ship at ort Vancouver in 1826 with little more than the clothes on his back and a belaying pin for a weapon. Fighting for life, starving, his from his pursuers--the Hudson's Bay Company and the British Navy--he follows the Columbia River inland toward a fate he never anticipated. In a trapping brigade, Skye falls in with legendary mountain men such as Jim Bridger and Tom "Broken Hand" Fitzpatrick and in the fabled Rocky Mountains finds another unexpected turn in his life when he meets the Crow maiden, Many Quill Woman, who will become his wife.
Richard Wheeler began a late-in-life career as a novelist at age fifty, and by his seventy-fifth year had written seventy novels. He began life as a newsman and later became a book editor, but turned to fiction full time in 1985.
He started by writing traditional westerns but soon was writing large-scale historical novels and then biographical novels. In recent years he has been writing mysteries as well, some as Axel Brand. His Lieutenant Joe Sonntag series occurs in 1940s Milwaukee, and focuses on life in a big, smoky industrial city just after World War Two.
He has won numerous awards, including the Owen Wister Award for lifetime achievement in the literature of the American West, and also six Spur Awards from Western Writers of America. He has received more Spur Awards than any other living author.
He grew up in Wisconsin and migrated West, holding newspaper jobs in Phoenix, Oakland, Carson City, and Billings. His wife, Sue Hart, is an English professor at Montana State University in Billings.
He has been focusing more and more on biographical novels. One of these, published in March, 2010, is called Snowbound, and is about the explorer John C. Fremont's tragic fourth expedition. It won a Spur Award.
For a quarter of a century he's largely made his living from writing fiction. That reality astonishes him. In his mid-seventies now, he is still dreaming up new stories.
Note: There are other Richard Wheelers writing books. One is an historian of the Civil War, and another writes histories of the Marine Corps, and another is a social scientist. Richard S. Wheeler is the novelist.
