The Riverman

In 1872, along a river thick with millions of logs bound for the mill, a crew of rivermen prepares to do the most dangerous work in America. Jack Orde, their quick-witted foreman, must rally his men against the river itself: a churning, unpredictable force that can crush a man against timber in an instant. But the real enemy is Simeon Reed, the dam owner who controls the water's flow and holds the men's livelihoods in his iron grip. As spring floods threaten to sweep the logs away or leave them stranded, Orde must navigate a tense standoff between the men who risk their lives on the water and the owner who sits safe on dry land. Stewart Edward White, who spent years in the logging camps of the American West, writes with the authority of someone who knows this world intimately: the brutal dawn starts, the specific vocabulary of the river, the way men forge bonds in shared danger. The Riverman captures a vanishing era when the continent's forests were being torn down by hand, and the men who did the tearing down were shaped by the work in ways both noble and tragic. For readers who love historical fiction grounded in actual labor and landscape, this is an unvarnished portrait of the men who tamed America's rivers.