THE LONG WALK WEST

A Novel of the Anza Expedition, 1775–1776

By: William Ferrier Jr.

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

September 1775. Two hundred and forty people walk out of Sonora into the desert. They are soldiers, wives, children, priests, and a thousand animals. They are carrying everything they own. They are going to found San Francisco.

Fray Pedro Font is the expedition's chaplain and astronomer — a man with a quadrant, a diary, and orders to record what he sees. What he sees is the hardest overland journey in the history of the American West: the crossing of the Colorado River, the killing sands of the Imperial Dunes, three children born on the open road, and a commander named Anza who holds 240 lives together through silence and iron will.

What he cannot record is everything else. The Yuma chief who gives his trust completely. The wife who rides the morning after giving birth. The four words Font writes in his diary beside a creek near the bay — words that will outlast everything else he ever wrote.

Based on the true diary of Fray Pedro Font and the historic Juan Bautista de Anza Expedition of 1775–1776, The Long Walk West is a novel about what it costs to found something — and what the founding destroys.

Written in the spare, declarative prose of Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy, this is literary historical fiction for readers of The Crossing, News of the World, and Empire of the Summer Moon.

From the author of The Long Walk North, the companion novel of the 1769 Portolá Expedition.