Salmon River Gauntlet: a Novel of the French and Indian War

By William Bless

It is the year 1757 and Elijah Collins traps beaver in the wilderness frontier of the New York Province, a region bitterly contested by British and French forces. While 38 miles upriver from a camp of colonists where his wife and young son await his return, Elijah witnesses the massacre of a Mohawk village by Algonquins allied with the French. He manages to save a nine-year-old Mohawk girl, whose sister and father are savagely killed in the attack, and who has been deliberately blinded.

The only means of survival is by river in a birch bark canoe, with the sadistic French commander and his regiment of troops - as well as hundreds of Abenaki, Ottawa, and Mi'kmaq warriors - in close pursuit. Following the August 9, 1757 slaughter of surrendered British regulars and provincials following the siege of Fort William Henry, anything goes in what the French General Montcalm, and other commanders view as a war of conquest. Elijah realizes that he must paddle the wilderness river, not only to save the girl and himself, but also to warn the colonial outpost downriver of the marauding French-allied tribes and regulars who would surely butcher them.

Set in primal wilderness against a tapestry of gorilla warfare and uncontrollable historical forces, my novel, Salmon River Gauntlet, dramatizes Elijah and the Mohawk girl's ordeal and struggle for survival running the boulder-strewn whitewater, the gauntlet of fearsome and murderous warriors, and power-hungry French, who view the territory as their North American empire. It is a story of unrelenting velocity, much like the rapids the hunted protagonists find themselves on.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0DSTTVX4L
• ISBN13: 9798303324541
• Release Date: January 2025
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 194 Pages
• Weight: 0.43 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.0" x 8.0"