From the Red River Expedition to the Siege of Khartoum
In 1870, the rivers of British North America became the proving ground for an unlikely friendship. As the Red River Expedition under General Wolseley pushed through Canada’s northwest, a British officer Lieutenant W.F. Butler struggled through the whitewater of the Winnipeg River to bring important intelligence to the general in the company of Prince, an Ojibwe bowsman whose mastery of the river was unchallenged. Bound together by danger and endurance, they travelled the continent as far as the Rocky Mountains to report on the native tribes struggling against the smallpox epidemic and the extermination of the buffalo.
Fourteen years later, fate brought them together again—this time on the Nile. In 1884, Butler and Prince joined a remarkable contingent of Canadian voyageurs and boatmen recruited by Britain for its desperate attempt to rescue General Gordon, besieged at Khartoum by the Mahdi. Fighting their way through the Nile’s treacherous cataracts under the relentless desert sun, they faced a journey as perilous as any they had known in Canada.
From the bestselling author of Kentucky Choirboy, White Slaves: 15 Years a Barbary Slave, An Absolute Secret, Shipwrecked Lives, Remembrance Man, and Playing Rudolf Hess comes this brilliantly imagined novel about the unlikely friendship between a British officer and an Ojibwe bowsman. A Bond Forged in Whitewater is an epic historical novel of friendship, courage, survival, and empire. Inspired by true events and drawn from the writings of W. F. Butler, it follows two men whose extraordinary bond was forged in the world’s most unforgiving waters.
