In the Moro

In the Moro is a historical novel built on John C. Fremont's Fourth Expedition, the winter crossing of 1848 and 1849 that ended in disaster in the mountains of southern Colorado. The catalogue description says the expedition took place 150 years before the book, and that men ate their mules and then each other until only two returned to civilization. The ending is fictionalized, and the description warns that it may surprise you.

The story moves between two times. In the present, a retired physician and a retired college history professor team up to find out what really happened during the snow-bound ordeal. In 1849, the reader is put inside the expedition itself. The publisher's blurb says the book jumps back and forth between the two until the reader feels like part of the past, and that it takes place in southwestern Colorado and northern New Mexico.

Wise did not come to the subject cold. A reference entry says his first published work, in Journal of the West in 1993, grew out of about ten years of research on Fremont's fourth expedition. In the Moro came out from Western Reflections in 1999 and was his second novel. Open Library files it under fiction, historical fiction and West (U.S.) fiction.

This novel is for readers of Western historical fiction who like a mystery wrapped around a real event, and for anyone drawn to survival stories set in the Colorado high country. People who have read about Fremont and want to see the ordeal imagined from the inside will find a lot to chew on. It also suits book clubs in the Four Corners states. It is a story about extreme hunger and cold, so readers who prefer gentler history should know what the description promises.

The cover copy on In the Moro describes Joe Wise as a cardiologist who lived in Santa Fe and whose real love was writing. He was born in Texas, and his first novel, Cannibal Plateau, was judged Best Historical Novel by the Southwest Writers Workshop. For In the Moro, the Colorado Independent Publishers Association gave him an award for fiction. The rest of his catalogue is on the author page.

More about Joe Wise, M.D. →

Fremont's Fourth Expedition was a privately financed attempt to prove that a railroad could cross the central Rockies in winter. According to Wikipedia, Fremont and his father-in-law, Senator Thomas Hart Benton, wanted to test a route along the 38th parallel from St. Louis to San Francisco, but Benton could not win federal funding. Fremont left in October 1848 with 35 men, and at Pueblo he hired the mountain man Old Bill Williams as guide.

On November 25 the party turned south near present-day Florence, Colorado, and crossed the Sangre de Cristo Range. Deep snow trapped the men, mules died, and on December 22 Fremont admitted the party had to retreat and resupply, heading south toward Taos, New Mexico. The last survivor reached Taos on February 12, 1849. Ten members of the party died, and at least one body was found partly eaten. The Museum Trail adds that the group split into smaller parties and that rescue came in mid-January 1849.

Source: Wikipedia: John C. Fremont