Trask

Trask

Set in 1848 on the wild edge of the continent, in the rainforests and rugged headlands of the Oregon coast, Trask follows a mountain man's quest for new opportunities and new land to settle. Elbridge Trask is a restless man, a gambler with God, nature, and life itself. Yearning for change, he sets out with Wakila, a young Clatsop Indian, and Charley Kehwa, a tamanawis man or spiritual leader of the tribe, on an extraordinary journey of discovery. "[Don Berry's novels] are all remarkable books. Historically well researched; accurate, precise to the details, marvelously evoked, and not gaudy or exaggerated in their invocation of fur trade and pioneer times. "Trask still stands as perhaps the finest novel of pioneer life on the early Pacific seashore. Don Berry's literary and cultural contributions...[make] him a pre-eminent figure in Northwest letters." Don Berry considered himself a native Oregonian, despite the fact that he was born in Minnesota, with a lineage from Fox Indians. After attending Reed College, where his housemates included poet Gary Snyder, who shared his interest in Eastern metaphysics, Berry began a lifetime of pursuing his many passions: playing down-home blues and composing synthesizer music, sumi drawing and painting, sculpting in bronze, exploring theoretical mathematics, and writing for prize-winning films. In addition to his three novels about the Oregon Territory (Trask, Moontrap, and To Build a Ship), published in the early 1960s, Berry wrote A Majority of Scoundrels, a history of the Rocky Mountain fur trade. An early Internet pioneer, he also created a remarkable body of literature that exists now only in cyberspace. Married with three children, Don Berry died at age 70 in 2001.