Oxen on the Ice
A Novel of the Noble Train

About this book:

In the bitter winter of 1775, with the American Revolution hanging by a thread, a twenty-five-year-old Boston bookseller named Henry Knox undertook the impossible: hauling sixty tons of cannon three hundred miles across frozen mountains, treacherous lakes, and trackless wilderness to break the siege of Boston. No roads. No bridges. No guarantee the ice would hold. Just oxen, timber, iron, and a refusal to accept defeat.

*Oxen on the Ice* plunges you into the mud, the numbing cold, and the grinding labor of the Noble Train of Artillery—one of the most audacious logistical feats in military history. From the stone walls of Ticonderoga to the heights of Dorchester, follow Knox and his ragged corps of teamsters, blacksmiths, and carpenters as they forge sleds from green maple, carve yokes fitted to the curve of an ox's neck, and coax fifty-nine cannon across a landscape determined to swallow them whole. Every cracked runner, every broken chain, every breath of wind off Lake George is rendered with visceral precision.

Meticulously researched and gloriously told, this is historical fiction at its most muscular and alive—a story of engineering daring, brotherhood forged in extremity, and the quiet, stubborn genius of a man who read his way into history. For readers of Patrick O'Brian, Bernard Cornwell, and David McCullough: the Revolution has never felt this heavy, this cold, or this real.