This book follows Barnabas Sackett's youngest son Jubal into the west. The setting is considerably earlier than most of L'Amour's mountain man epics. The native tribes are Kickapoo and Natchez, instead of Apache, Sioux, and Cheyenne. The wilderness is less touched by European influence except for the Spanish soldiers filtering up from the south. L'Amour's notes at the end even make the mammoth encounter feasible! ( )

Booklist Review: Louis L'Amour continues his popular saga of the Sackett clan, an early American dynasty. This installment features Jubal Sackett, a wily, homespun seventeenth-century hero who sets off to traverse the vast, unexplored North American hinterland. As he ranges through and beyond the mountains, Jubal befriends Keokotah, a fiercely proud Kickapoo brave, and together they help shield an astonishingly beautiful Natchez princess from a vengeful renegade Indian and an unscrupulous Spanish soldier. Pitted against a host of adverse elements, Jubal emerges as the epitome of the natural frontiersman, a man who must rely solely upon his five senses and his keen wits in order to survive in the untamed wilderness. L'Amour's ability to spin a good yarn compensates for his lack of stylistic finesse, thus helping to explain his phenomenal success as a genre writer. ((Reviewed May 1, 1985)) ( )

Great book ( )