Bitter's Run

by Rod Collins

John Bitter scanned the hilltops with his field glasses, blaming unfamiliar territory for his uneasy feelings, but past experience taught him not to ignore his hunches. Something's brewing, he thought.

 

Following Lee's surrender of the Northern Army of Virginia to Grant on April 9, 1865 at Appomattox, Captain John Bitter of Abiqua Creek, Oregon musters out of the 40th Missouri. A loner, Bitter plans a quick ride home over the Oregon Trail. The good Lord, however, has other plans for him.

 

After a month on the Trail, two gun battles, a bruising fistfight to settle a blood feud, a new wife, and two adopted sons, Bitter tells Rockford, his big, mean, black horse, "This sure complicates the business of getting back to Oregon."

 

Bitter now finds himself the leader of a mixed entourage going a black pioneer family earlier wagon trains shunned; an Irish rebel turned galvanized Yankee; a dispossessed Cherokee turned Cheyenne medicine man; the rescued sister of a Bannock chief; a white boy adopted by the Cheyenne; and a scout for the Union Army who is also one of the richest men in Oregon.

 

Bitter's Run is a spirited and adventurous tale. Told in three parts, it portrays the realities and uncertainties of life on the Oregon Trail, of war-weary men seeking or returning to a homestead in Oregon, and of the courageous women who rode with them.

418 pages, Paperback

Published January 25, 2024

About the author

Rod Collins is the founder and owner of Wiki-Management, a Denver-based management consulting firm. Rod helps companies make the leap to extraordinary performance by showing them how they can gain quick access to the most untapped resource in almost every business: the collective knowledge of its own people. By learning how to leverage this rich resource, business leaders are able to transform slow-moving hierarchical bureaucracies into agile collaborative communities.

Collins is the former chief operating executive of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Federal Employee Program, one of the nations largest and most successful business alliances, with over $19 billion in annual revenues. Under his leadership, the business increased its market share by 16 percentage points, and year after year, set new records for operational and financial performance.

Rod is the author of Leadership in a Wiki World: Leveraging Collective Knowledge to Make the Leap to Extraordinary Performance. He also writes a weekly blog on management innovation, which highlights how the most successful business leaders are reinventing management to stay ahead of todays ever-accelerating pace of change.
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