Revisiting our friend Titus Bass

nhmoose said:

The author has passed

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Back in 2001. He did an amazing job while he was here. Everything I've read by him, including his Plainsmen and Son of the Plains series, were extremely well done. Not many authors are that consistent and historically accurate.

SPOILER ALERT! I've heard that Johnston told his wife that when he killed Bass that he would die soon after. He killed Titus off in Wind Walker which was released in January of 2001. Johnston died in March of 2001.

All of this is good to know. I read Stewart Edward White's The Long Rifle when I was in my teens (they had it in the school library). Then A.B. Guthrie's The Big Sky a few years later. I really liked both of those. In about 1982, I read Mountain Man by Vardis Fisher, and didn't care for it at all. The character was over-developed, many of the situations were unlikely, and it just wasn't believable. It sort of turned me off to fur-trade fiction, and almost all of my reading about that era since then has been non-fiction and literature from the period. So, I missed out on reading the Titus Bass novels, although I had heard of some of them.

These are good endorsements in this thread. Maybe I'll give Mr. Johnston a try.

@pab1, what would you recommend for a starter? If you had to pick one title out of that series for a blackpowder shooter, fur trade, plainsman, and history buff to read, which would it be?

Thanks!

Notchy Bob

Notchy Bob said:

@pab1, what would you recommend for a starter? If you had to pick one title out of that series for a blackpowder shooter, fur trade, plainsman, and history buff to read, which would it be?

Thanks!

Notchy Bob

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If you're only going to read one out of the series, I would go with the first book released in the series, Carry the Wind. I'll be surprised if you can resist reading the rest of the series after reading that book.


There are a couple other fur trade era series I've enjoyed. The So Wild A Dream series by Win Blevins (author of Give Your Heart to the Hawks) and The Temple Buck Quartet by Edward Lewis Henry (aka Poredevil). Both authors know the fur trade era well. While the stories in all three series is similar I enjoyed them all. Out of the three series, the Carry the Wind series is my favorite.

I own the complete nine volume set. "Carry the Wind" and "Border Lords are signature copies addressed to me by Terry. I have read the entire series twice and will read them again in the near future. I consider them to be Terry's opus magnum.