The Morning River : A Novel of the Great Missouri Wilderness

During the winter of 1825, Richard Hamilton—a timid Harvard philosophy student—arrives in St. Louis on business for his father. Robbed and beaten, desperate to save his life, he reluctantly joins the crew of the Maria, a fur trader's keelboat. Bound for the beautiful, wild, and dangerous Indian country of the Upper Yellowstone River, the native Bostonian begins the education and adventure of a lifetime.

On a converging path is Packrat, a Pawnee warrior who captures a beautiful young Shoshone medicine woman named Heals Like a Willow. But slaves with ties to the spirit world can—and do—fight back.

As the Maria struggles deeper into the wilderness, Richard and Willow are cast together: seekers of knowledge and spirit, unwitting adversaries separated by time, space, and birthright. As inevitable as the collision of their two worlds, their love begins to unfold—and with it the terrible consequences of a forbidden consummation.


The Morning River is the first of The Man from Boston duology from bestselling author W. Michael Gear—a western that has become a classic tale of the dangers and possibilities of the American frontier.

“Gear is a vigorous writer....He tells a gripping tale.” —Publishers Weekly

“Michael Gear's Indians, mountain men, entrepreneurs, and even effete New Englanders ring faithful to their time and place. This is not only a good story with finely etched characters, but good history as well. Michael Gear has crafted fiction and history into a good read.” —Robert M. Utley, author of The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull

“I am thrilled with pleasure and deep satisfaction at every page I read.” —Norman Zollinger, Golden Spur Award-winning author of Riders to Cibola and Chapultepec