Tame the Wild Wind
"They were two people with wild hearts in a wild land, belonging nowhere but to each other." Bittner's western melodrama is yet another formula romance about a heroine raised in a repressive 19th-century religious community (Amish, Quaker, Shaker, etc.) who finds happiness, freedom, sex and security with a worldly hero. This time the "savage" fellow is Gabriel Beaumont (aka Tall Bear, a Sioux warrior), who has seen his entire family slaughtered by white men. On a Wyoming trail, wearing only a breech cloth and with hair that comes down to his waist, he rescues pregnant Faith Sommers, who has run away from her Quaker family and whose feckless young husband has been murdered. Gabe decides to live among whites; he cuts his hair and moves in with Faith. After much melodrama, suffering and killing of villains, Faith and Gabe turn Sommers Station into a thriving little town. Bittner is better at history than plot, which is often more wooden than wild.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.