Race to the Moonrise

Race to the Moonrise is a children's adventure set around 1200 A.D. Two young people, Long Legs and his sister Little Basket, live in northern Mexico. Word comes that the people of the Far North have displeased the gods, and the pair set out on foot for what is now southwestern Colorado. Little Basket is a girl with special powers. Long Legs is her older brother, rugged and protective, and on the author's website he is described as training to be a long distance trader.

Their errand gives the story its pace. Along the way they stop at many communities to collect offerings for the Moonrise Ceremony, so every stretch of the road brings a new village and a new people. The book is fiction, and it is listed as juvenile fiction, but the places it visits are real ones. Readers pass through the Mimbres Valley, the Gila and Salt River basins, Wupatki Pueblo, Chaco Canyon, Aztec, Mesa Verde and Chimney Rock.

Sally Crum wrote it as a story first, with the history carried inside the plot instead of piled on top. Her own teacher's guide says the book can be read a chapter a day, and it lays out twelve chapters. The description calls it both a treasure for the young reader and an entertaining, informative yarn for adults, which fits a book that a parent and child can read together.

This book suits young readers who like a journey story and have never met the Ancestral Pueblo world. The author's guide aims at fourth through eighth grade students, and says older children and adults will enjoy it too. Teachers building a unit on the early Southwest will find a ready companion in the guide. Parents who plan a trip to Mesa Verde, Chaco or Chimney Rock can read it first. The book runs to about a hundred pages in our catalogue record.

Sally Crum has lived in western Colorado and the Four Corners area for over thirty years, according to her website. Most of her professional work has been archaeological survey for private contractors, the Navajo Nation and the U.S. Forest Service. She wrote this book and its sequel, Race to the River, for younger readers. Her author page here lists all three of her books with us, including a history of Colorado's tribes.

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The places in this story were all part of a real Southwest. The National Park Service says Chaco Canyon's cultural flowering began in the mid 800s and lasted more than 300 years, and that by 1050 it was the ceremonial, administrative and economic center of the San Juan Basin. Roads linked the canyon's great houses to more than 150 others across the region, and Chaco may have been the hub of a turquoise trading network that brought in macaws, copper bells and shells.

Chimney Rock, where the children's trip ends, sits in Archuleta County between Durango and Pagosa Springs. About 2,000 people lived in the settlement between AD 925 and 1125, and its Great House Pueblo was first built in AD 1076 and finished in AD 1093. At the Moon's northern standstill it appears between Chimney Rock and Companion Rock for about 16 months, and the Great House went up during standstills in 1076 and 1093.

Source: Wikipedia, Chimney Rock National Monument