St. Clair's Trace (Fort Hamilton Days)

The year is 1791. The fledgling United States is desperate to secure the Ohio frontier, a vast territory claimed on paper but fiercely defended by the Miami and Shawnee nations. To break the Western Confederacy's grip, the task falls to Major General Arthur St. Clair, a man haunted by past failures and crippled by gout, accepting what he knows may be his last campaign.

From the sweltering, conspiratorial offices of Philadelphia-where he is commissioned by Secretary of War Henry Knox and assured of President Washington's confidence-to the muddy chaos of Fort Washington, St. Clair must confront a political battle far deadlier than any on the frontier. He accepts the command knowing the deck is stacked against him: his army of inexperienced levies is a shambles, and the essential supplies promised by corrupt government contractors, like Alexander Hamilton's associate William Duer, are discovered to be rotten flour, damp powder, and horses too weak to carry their loads.

As St. Clair is literally carried aboard a leaking flatboat-too incapacitated by pain to stand-he begins a four-hundred-mile journey into the hostile wilderness, toward a confrontation with the formidable warriors led by the Miami chief Little Turtle. This story, based on known historical facts, plunges the reader into the heart of the crisis. Through the eyes of both historical figures and compelling fictional characters like Shep Tackett, a hard-nosed Kentucky horseman, and Hannah Cobb, an officer's wife who counts the dead horses and weevils in the flour barrels, the novel exposes the catastrophic political failures and heartbreaking human cost of the campaign. It is a vivid, ground-level account of ambition and corruption at the birth of a nation, where a gentleman's military plan met the brutal reality of the Northwest Territory.

About Richard O Jones
After 25 years writing the first draft of history as a writer and editor for his hometown newspaper, the Hamilton Journal-News, Richard O Jones left the grind of daily journalism in the fall of 2013 for a life of true crime. He is the author of two books on the History Press imprint, Cincinnati's Savage Seamstress: The Shocking Edythe Klumpp Murder Scandal (October, 2014) and The First Celebrity Serial Killer: Confessions of the Strangler Alfred Knapp (May, 2015). In 2016, he began a twice-weekly podcast "True Crime Historian" (www.truecrimehistorian.com) where he tells stories of the scoundrels, scandals and scourges of the past through newspaper accounts in the golden age of yellow journalism. He created the Two-Dollar Terror series of novella-length ebooks. Mr. Jones, a creative writing graduate of Miami University, Ohio, spent most of his career as an arts journalist and has won numerous awards for his reviews and profiles. In 2004, he was named a Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts Theatre and Musical Theatre program at the Annenberg School of Journalism. The Ohio Associated Press named him Feature Writer of the Year in 2011. Since leaving the newspaper world, Mr. Jones has become an active member of his local history community as a board member of the Butler County Historical Society, a member of the History Speakers Bureau and a regular presenter at Miami University in a program titled "Yesterday's News." The Michael J. Colligan History Project of Miami University presented Mr. Jones with a Special Recognition for Contributions to Public History for his coverage of the Centennial Commemoration of the Great Flood of 1913.

Photo by Sandra M. Orlett