Sometimes you have to lose everything before you can find your way home.
Ten-year-old John Wilson Barnes has just lost both his parents. Misunderstood by the people who promised to care for him and with nowhere left to belong, he does the only thing he can think to do: he runs. What follows is a journey across the wilds of Montana that will shape the rest of his life.
John finds refuge with a solitary sheepherder, brotherhood with a fellow orphan, and an unexpected gift for working with horses. He also finds himself drawn to a mysterious stranger who seems to know where John has been, where he’s going, and perhaps even why.
But every time John begins to believe he has found a home, it is taken from him.
By fifteen, he is once again on the run, this time with three horses, a gun, and the terrifying belief that he has killed a man. His flight carries him deep into the Montana wilderness and eventually into the path of Arthur Bannack, the charismatic leader of an armed survivalist compound who is convinced John has been sent by God.
As violence closes in and the line between faith and fanaticism becomes increasingly dangerous, John must decide for himself whom to trust, what to believe, and whether a boy who has lost nearly everyone he loves can risk belonging to someone again.
Told by an eighty-eight-year-old John to the granddaughter sitting beside his hospital bed, Bitterroot Valley is a sweeping story of horses and wilderness, friendship and survival, faith and family—and one boy’s long search for a place, and a person, he can finally call home.
Ride into the Bitterroot Valley and discover where John Wilson Barnes’s extraordinary story begins.