Rivers Run Deep

Virginia, 1747. Fifteen-year-old George Washington is still defined by the achievements of his elder brother Lawrence, but surveying, land speculation and service to influential patrons begin to draw him towards the western frontier. Britain and France both claim the Ohio Country, while Indigenous nations defend their own territories and negotiate among rival imperial powers. The lives of traders, settlers, fugitives and former Jacobites converge as commercial ambition turns the forks of the Ohio into the focus of a continental contest.

Washington’s growing reputation leads to a mission carrying Virginia’s warning to the French posts beyond the Appalachians. The journey forces him to depend on frontier guides, Native diplomacy and endurance in a landscape that colonial maps treat as available for possession. The novel follows his movement out of Lawrence’s shadow while showing how personal advancement, competing land claims and fragile alliances created the conditions for the French and Indian War.