MOUNTAIN MAN ZEB SIMMS - ZEB AND THE MISSIONARY: A RIVETING WESTERN ANTIC
Famed scout and mountain man Zeb Simms is grieving from the recent death of his Comanche wife.
Zeb takes a job with Marcus Whitman, a missionary in the Columbia River Basin at the Waiilatpu Mission.
Whitman and his wife Narcissa are attempting to convert Cayuse Indians to the Christian faith, but the two do not understand Indian ways and despite Zeb's attempts to advise them, manage to alienate the tribe.
Hordes of European immigrants arrive every month at the mission and their diseases decimate the Cayuse people increasing tensions with the Indians.
Whitman gives Zeb the task of convincing Tiloukaikt the Cayuse chief to bring his people in to accept religion and take up the white man's ways of farming and living. However, before he can accomplish this Zeb is waylaid on a meat hunting expedition.
Zeb and his partner de Anza are stranded in the wilderness on foot with nothing between them except the rags on their backs and a few picked berries to eat, only to wind up being captured and made slaves to be bartered by Shoshone Indians.
What follows is a harrowing adventure of wilderness survival, starvation, living off your wits and what you can scrounge. During a long trek, Zeb and Anza are staked out as bear bait, fed to swarming ants, forced to chew the gizzards of animals, shelter inside the body of a gutted buffalo and run a race for life against pursuing Native Americans.
Set against a backdrop of the rugged Oregon Country of 1847 (today Western Idaho and Eastern Washington State), Zeb and the Missionary is also the story of the Marcus Whitman massacre and the clash of cultures that resulted in the Cayuse Indian War.