The Last Crossing: A Novel Hardcover - 2004

From the publisher

A#l best-seller in Canada and winner of the Canadian Booksellers Association's Fiction Book of the Year Award, "The Last Crossing is a sweeping tale of breathtaking quests, adventurous detours, and hard-won redemption. Master storyteller Guy Vanderhaeghe--hailed by Richard Ford as "simply a wonderful writer"--takes us on an exhilarating journey from the ivy-covered towers of Oxford in Victorian England to the dusty whiskey trading posts of the nineteenth-century American and Canadian West. Englishmen Charles and Addington Gaunt are ordered by their tyrannical industrialist father to find their brother Simon, who has gone missing in the wilds of the American West. Charles, a disillusioned artist, and Addington, a disgraced military captain, set off to Fort Benton in America and enlist the services of a guide to lead them north, where Simon was last seen. The brothers hire the enigmatic Jerry Potts, half Blackfoot, half Scot, who suffers from his own painful past. At Addington's command, the party grows to include Caleb Ayto, a sycophantic American journalist, who is to record the journey for posterity; Lucy Stoveall, a fiery and beautiful woman who is bent on finding the men who viciously killed her sister; Custis Straw, a Civil War veteran in love with Lucy; and saloon keeper Aloysius Dooley. This unlikely posse, now encumbered with both psychological baggage and wagon trains, becomes entangled in an unfolding drama that forces each to come to terms with his or her own demons. Told from alternating points of view and in vivid flashbacks, The "Last Crossing conveys the varied lives of its search party in haunting scenes--a bear hunt at dawn, the discovery of an Indian village decimatedby smallpox, a sharpshooter's devastating annihilation of his prey, a soldier's guilt-ridden memory of his own survival, and an atypical love story. "The Last Crossing is a novel of ruggedness and salvation, an epic masterpiece set in a time when worlds collided, were destroyed, and were built anew.