MOONTRAP

By Don Berry

Oregon State University Press

Paperback, 336 pages

The late Don Berry’s trilogy of novels about the settlement of Oregon, “Trask,” “Moontrap” and “To Build a Ship,” were first published in the early 1960s. Oregon State University Press did a big favor for a new generation of readers, and some of us who missed them the first time around, with new editions.

In a review a couple of months ago, I said “Trask” was the best book about Oregon I had ever read.

“Moontrap,” recently released along with “To Build a Ship,” is its equal.

As he did in “Trask,” Berry explores the impact on the land and the people who were already here as settlers began to pour into Oregon country.

In both novels, the story is focused through the lives of mountain men, men uniquely suited to compare the cultures of American Indians and settlers because they had lived in both worlds.

The novels take shape around events, places and figures from the early days of the Oregon Territory. In “Trask” the focus was Elbridge Trask, a former mountain man who was the first white man to settle in the Tillamook Bay area.

In “Moontrap,” historical figures Joe Meek, a mountain man turned settler, and former Hudson’s Bay Co. factor Dr. John McLoughlin, among others, appear prominently.

“Moontrap” begins with an event that, perhaps more than any other, marked the end of an era and the beginning of a new one – the trial and hanging in Oregon City of five Cayuse tribal chiefs for the massacre at Whitman Mission near Walla Walla.

It’s the starting point for a deeply personal look at how the change affected the lives of those who came before the settlers. The landscape and people of pioneer Oregon comes vividly to life as Berry tells the story of two mountain men and how they face the end of their former way of life.

In the face of prejudice and suspicion, one man, Johnson Monday, is attempting to make a life with Mary, his pregnant Shoshone wife, on the banks of the Willamette River.

His friend, aging “wild man” trapper Webster T. Webster, comes to observe encroaching civilization.

The two men and those around them share humor and experience tragedy as their paths converge. It’s an often painful, but always compelling journey. Berry’s novels are thoroughly researched and offer plenty of nuggets of Oregon history. His sympathies were clearly with the Indians who faced the loss of their way of life. “Trask” and “Moontrap” describe what was lost in painful detail.

Berry has the ability to strip the land of today’s farms and cities and repopulate it with the forests and creatures of 150 years ago. Sunlight and moonlight flood this novel as Berry illuminates the landscape of pioneer Oregon with a spectacular Northwest summer.

Here is his description of a sunrise: “In time the eastern sky turned coppery green and pale, silently diminishing the depth of night. Near the horizon, long strings of clouds were outlined in shadow, their edges growing bright with the approaching sun. The predawn silence settled over the Willamette Valley like a mist.”

Berry died in 2001. His trilogy was his best-known work, garnering awards and great reviews. The final book of the three, “To Build a Ship,” follows the theme of change, but with a different perspective.

Look for a review in this column soon.