Wilderness (book series)
Wilderness (book series) is the generational saga of a mountain man and his Shoshone wife by American author David Robbins. The series has run for twenty years, making it one of the longest contemporary series written by a single author. The first title was published in 1990. New titles are published four times a year. To date there have been sixty-four regular books and seven Giant Editions. The series has received critical notice from the Pulp Rack, Western Fiction Review and others.
Premise
The series begins with young New York accountant Nathaniel King deciding to travel to the remote Rocky Mountains with his uncle, Zeke. (Robbins has said that the main character’s first name is an homage to James Fenimore Cooper and his hero of the Leatherstocking Tales, Nathaniel "Natty" Bumppo) The books go on to relate Nate’s encounters with wild beasts and various tribes. He falls in love with a Shoshone maiden and builds a cabin for them in the area of what is now known as Estes Park, Colorado. They go on to have a son and a daughter and over the course of the first sixty books the son grows into manhood and marries a white woman, Louisa Clark, while the daughter, now in her teens, is going through the angst of young romance. The stories run the gamut from the realistic to the fantastical. In most, the narrative parallels the lives of the early mountain men but in several Nate King has adventures with lost tribes or creatures out of Indian legend. The series puts a stress on action and characterization.
Characters
- Nate King isn’t a typical mountain man. He doesn’t indulge in tobacco, rarely drinks and seldom swears. He likes to read and has a small library. His favorites are Cooper and Thomas Paine. His Indian name is Grizzly Killer. His life revolves around his wife and children, to whom he is intensely devoted.
- Wi-no-na, his Shoshone wife, is a natural linguist. As Nate readily admits, she is more intelligent than he is, and puts her family before all else.
- Zach King, their son, is what others call a half-breed, a term he resents. He is hot-tempered and prone to violence and in his younger days lived only to count coup. Later he married Louise Clark and kept his violent tendencies in check until an incident sent him on a killing spree that resulted in his being taken into custody by the army and put on trial for multiple murders.
- Evelyn King is a handful. Until she was in her teens she wanted to leave the mountains and live in civilized society. But the arrival of a young warrior from an Eastern tribe changes her mind.
- Shakespeare McNair is based in part on Jim Bridger and Joe Meek, real Mountain Men. Like Bridger, he is passionately fond of the Bard. Like meek, he is also bombastic. The combination provides for much of the series’ humor.
- Blue Water Woman is McNair’s Flathead wife. Perhaps the most level-headed of all the characters, she is as down to earth as McNair is flighty.