MOONTRAP

A successor to Trask (1960) and again set in Oregon in the 1840's, with authenticity of time and place. The setting is an isolated territory where old Webb, a mountain man, views the encroaching towns and farms with intense distrust. He re-news an old friendship with Johnson Monday, a farmer married to an Indian, Mary, who is soon to have their first child. The subsequent events- the town preacher attacking mixed marriages, a hanging of Indians in town, Mary's murder of the child and suicide, and the subsequent killing of the preacher by Webb, who escapes to the mountains, builds up to something more than a western, perhaps an indigenous, valid and certainly touching novel.