In his most exciting and ambitious novel to date, bestselling writer W. Michael Gear mixes an anthropologist's insight, a historian's precision, and a novelist's vision to transport us to the great Missouri - the Morning River - in 1825, when the American interior was about to be opened and many native peoples stood on the brink of holocaust.That same winter, Richard Hamilton, a timid Harvard philosophy student, arrives in Saint Louis on his father's business. Robbed and beaten, desperate to save his life, he reluctantly joins the crew of the Maria, a fur trader's keelboat.Bound for the beautiful, wild, and dangerous Indian country of the Upper Yellowstone, the…