Meridian - Tapa blanda

"If you read only one novel of the historic West this year, make it Norman Zollinger's "Meridian."" --Tony Hillerman"A grand, sweeping historical novel." --"The Lincoln Journal Star""A magnificent novel, as close to being a true epic as had been written of this era." --"Roundup Magazine"

Bradford Stone, mapmaker and artist, comes to Bent's Fort on the Arkansas in 1845 to join John C. Fremont's Third Expedition, but in particular to meet and work with the man who has been his hero all his life, Christopher Houston Carson - Kit - the greatest mountain man, guide, and Indian fighter. The long-anticipated meeting almost turns out disastrously for young Stone, but he and Carson become fast friends, fighting and exploring together in the great West in one of the most turbulent periods of American history. Stone struggles to unravel the apparent contradictions in his friend Carson, who is generous in the extreme even to his enemies, but who blindly follows his superior's orders. But after a year of sharing perils, triumphs, losses, and tragedies, the celebrated scout remains an enigma even to the perceptive, sensitive Stone. The young artist meets and falls in love with darkly beautiful Ana Barragan, cousin of Carson's wife, and contends for her love with her pathologically proud father, Don Bernardo, and with her gentle suitor, Santa Fe trader Luis Aragon. In this enormously rich, tumultuous tale of love and conquest, Zollinger tells how in three short years a third of the country's land mass was added to the maps that Fremont and Stone made and left as their legacy.