Although I have read quite a number of Richard S. Wheeler westerns over the years, I have avoided his Barnaby Skye series, mainly because there are so many novels in the series (about 20). I can handle trilogies. After that the challenge just seems too imposing.

Nevertheless I have read “The Far Tribes” (1990), one of the early books, and found it to be wonderful. Barnaby Skye is a former British sailor who ventured into the American West and stayed, becoming a hunter, trapper, guide and Indian expert. He travels with his two wives, Victoria and Mary, each from a different Indian tribe. Mary has a baby, Dirk.

Mister Skye, as he insists on being addressed, is hired to escort a party of Easterners to tribes in the Yellowstone area. They include a businessman, traveling with his wife and daughter, who views the Indians as potential customers and wants to show them his wares and determine what products they might most desire; a military man gathering intelligence that might prove useful in the Indian battles likely to come; and a scientist.

The way west proves interesting enough, but the real drama happens on the way back, as winter nears, when they are attacked by a renegade band while still sleeping. Virtually everything they have except the skimpy nightclothes they wear and Skye's ornery horse, Jawbone, is either stolen or destroyed. They are left to die in near-freezing rain.

How Mister Skye brings his party, or most of it, to safety and handles the treachery from within makes for a riveting tale. Wheeler has always striven for realism in his fiction. In some cases, as in novels about Bat Masterson and Major Reno, he writes about real people and events. In other novels he writes about problems pioneers, settlers, cattlemen and miners, etc., would have faced in the West. In “The Far Tribes” his detail about how a group of people in such a desperate situation might have found shelter, built a fire, gotten food, made clothing and so on is truly stunning.

I'm glad I still have so many Barnaby Skye novels yet to read. ( )