The 14th Colony: The Wilderness Takes Root, Book Two

France gave him a second chance. The wilderness will decide if he deserves it.

In the autumn of 1720, Pierre Mayeux steps off La Profond onto the white
sand shore of Nouvelle Biloxi—a young man carrying a heavy burden - a hidden
past, and a sentence from the French Crown. He did not choose Louisiana. Louisiana
was chosen for him.

What he finds is a colony in chaos: a fledgling capital carved from swampland,
a financial empire collapsing on the other side of the Atlantic, a wilderness
so vast and indifferent it breaks men before it bothers to bury them. John Law’s
Mississippi Bubble has burst. The concessions along the great river are suffering.
The Germans are dying on the beaches. The Natchez Indians are watching.

But Pierre also finds Marie Sellier—the daughter of a commissaire, as
displaced as he is—and a friendship with Adrien LeBeau that will outlast every
catastrophe the New World can conjure. Together they marry, build, plant, and
survive. Pierre and Marie move upriver to the Arkansas Post while Adrien and Creola move to the Dironbourg Concession, then all four move to the Natchez bluffs above Fort Rosalie, where the tobacco grows dark and the silence between the French and the Natchez grows darker still.

Then comes November 28, 1729.

In a single dawn, the world Pierre has spent nine years building is taken from him.
The Natchez Massacre—among the most devastating attacks on French settlers in the
history of the colony—leaves 235 dead and a continent changed. Pierre and Adrien
survive, spared by warriors who have no quarrel with waggoneers and tailors. But
survival and loss, in this country, have always arrived together.

The Wilderness Takes Root is the second volume of The 14th Colony
series—a sweeping historical saga grounded in the actual colonial archives of
French Louisiana. Baptisms, marriages and deaths are all recorded in the ledger of the Catholic Church.
Based on the documented life of Pierre Mayeux, whose name
appears in the census records of Pointe Coupée Parish, this is a story of what
it cost ordinary people to plant a civilization in an untamed wilderness.

For readers of Pachinko, Outlander, and The Name of the Rose—those
who believe history is most truly understood through the lives of the men and
women who made it and were made by it.

The 14th Colony Series
Book One: The 14th Colony: The Struggles of a Young Frenchman to Reach the Louisiana Colony
Book Two: The 14th Colony: The Wilderness Takes Root
Book Three: The 14th Colony: The Ground That Holds
Book Four: The 14th Colony: What the River Keeps