Ride the river

Ride the River is a western by the American writer Louis L'Amour, published by Bantam Books in 1983. It is one of the novels about the Sackett family, a clan whose stories run from the Tennessee mountains across the American frontier.

Echo Sackett is sixteen when she makes the long journey north to Philadelphia to claim money left to her family. The trip takes her out of the mountains and into a city where the rules are different and a young woman on her own is assumed to be helpless. James White, a lawyer who has been waiting for a Sackett to come and collect, has plans for the inheritance that do not involve handing it over, and the book follows Echo as she deals with the people who mean to cheat her.

L'Amour's Sackett novels are family history as much as adventure, and this one is told from the point of view of a young woman who has inherited both the family's money and its habit of refusing to be pushed.