St. Clair’s Trace

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.