Terry Grosz
In 1806, the return to St. Louis of Lewis and Clark from their epic journey across the unexplored American West with their tales of untold abundance of valuable furbearers, especially beaver, excited the populace! Men like General Ashley and Major Henry responded to such tales of valuable furbearers in abundance by forming a fur company, employing 100 adventurous young men as company trappers, and keelboating up the Missouri River to the Yellowstone to establish a fort and trading post. There they initiated trade with the Indians, the principal harvesters of animal furs in America, and sent their own company trappers out to harvest valuable furbearers, especially beaver. Thus begins Vince “Buck Snort” Toni and his Indian “Brother”, Wind Horse’s lives, first as orphans at a ‘hellhole’ orphanage, which by fate, exploded them into a life as fur trappers in the beautiful but dangerous largely unexplored American West! In the adventurous years that followed, Buck Snort Toni and Wind Horse trapped beaver and wolves along the Bighorn River facing freezing waters, violent “Ball Lightning” thunderstorms, buffalo stampedes, a deadly Frontier web of revenge, “Winter Bears”, vicious Northern Arapaho ‘Sons of the Prairies’, renegade Hudson Bay fur trappers, dangerous ‘pasts’ from their earlier days in the orphanage, killed horse thieves, and joined the brotherhood of adventurous fur trappers known today as “Mountain Men”. Then when Fate forced them from the field, they discovered a ‘circle of life’ surrounded by a Frontier Grace… “Buck Snort” Toni and “Wind Horse”, Mountain Men is an epic story of two intertwined lives, formed by destiny, forged in the fires of the American West and ultimately framed in “Frontier Grace”.
