The Printed Page

Title: Across the Endless River
Author/website: Thad Carhart
301 pages
Publisher: Doubleday
Publication date: September ’09
Genre: Historical fiction
Would I recommend it: Absolutely
Journal notes: I really, really enjoyed Thad Carhart’s book Across the Endless River. Having read Sacajawea (Lewis & Clark Expedition) by Anna Waldo years ago I was excited to get my hands on this book. It actually hit my WL days before Anna offered me a review copy. Baptiste’s vivid descriptions of yesteryear bring life to his story. The reader is immersed in his childhood where he splits time between his schooling in St. Louis and his summers with his father hunting and trapping for a living. Baptiste details the manhood ceremony of his Indian brothers. Because his path has taken a different direction he is excluded from this rite of passage. He describes watching multitudes of buffalo roam the plains of rippling prairie grass that look like ocean waves. A buffalo hunt unfolds around the reader as horse and rider shy away from these large intimidating, stampeding creatures. His first visit to Paris brings immense awe and inspiration. It also brings home the realization that his is a life between two worlds – his Indian heritage and the white world. He is a man of both cultures yet not fully accepted by either. It was a most enjoyable journey through Baptiste’s eyes. My only regret is that it ended too soon. I wanted to spend more time with this very interesting man.

Born in 1805 on the Lewis & Clark expedition, Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau was the son of the expedition’s translators, Sacagawea and Toussaint Charbonneau. Across The Endless River evokes the formative years of this mixed-blood child of the frontier, entering the wild and mysterious world of his boyhood along the Missouri. Baptiste is raised both as William Clark’s ward in St. Louis and by his parents among the villages of the Mandan tribe on the far northern reaches of the river.

In 1823, eighteen-year-old Baptiste is invited to cross the Atlantic with the young Duke Paul of Württemberg, whom he meets on the frontier. During their travels throughout Europe, Paul introduces Baptiste to a world he never imagined. Increasingly, Baptiste senses the limitations of life as an outsider; only Paul’s older cousin, Princess Theresa, understands the richness of his heritage. Their affair is both passionate and tender, but Theresa’s clear-eyed notions of love, marriage, and the need to fashion one’s own future push Baptiste to consider what he truly needs.

In Paris, he meets Maura Hennesy, the beautiful and independent daughter of a French-Irish wine merchant. Baptiste describes his life on the fast-changing frontier to Maura, and she begins to imagine a different destiny with this enigmatic American. Baptiste ultimately faces a choice: whether to stay in Europe or to return to the wilds of North America. His decision will resonate strongly with those who today find themselves at the intersection of cultures, languages, and customs

(Across the Endless River was provided to me by Anna of FSB Associates. I was not paid and the book is being shipped to another book blogger. )