A desperate English king had turned loose the swarms of native warriors to threaten the northern regions of the Susquehanna with death and plunder. General Knox called on Simon Braide to make the vital map that would guide Washington's forces in defense of this territory-whenever they could be spared to bolster the meager but gallant ranks of the men in buckskin who now patrolled the lonely forest rivers.

Young Braide set out upon this mission with these vicious words, his fiery-tempered bride, Celine, ringing in his ears: "Some day I'll make you truly sorry for what you have done to me ..." And as though in answer to her curse, ill fate was to dog Simon's footsteps from the evening he returned to find his home wrecked, his wife gone, and the precious map stolen or destroyed by Indian raiders.

The relentless search that followed led him within the shadow of a British scaffold at Niagara, lighted by the flames of Iroquois fires. Misfortune brought down upon him, in addition, the wrath of the ailing General Sullivan, who sent troopers of Braide's own forces to arrest him for high treason and alienated the girl he came to love almost too late.

With the authority of a true historian and the skill of an adept storyteller, Herbert Stover has interwoven Simon Braide's perilous adventures with the events that beleaguered the hard-pressed patriot army: Colonel Boone's attempt to build a road through native-inhabited forests against insurmountable odds; the mutiny that threatened the troops of General Wayne in Princeton; the intrigue of Britain's arch spy ring; and the menace of hordes of rapacious Indian warriors commanded by English Rangers.

In Men in Buckskin, the author of Song of the Susquehanna brings a rousing drama that can be found only in history.