If you’ve resolved to read more books in 2024, you may want to give “The Road to Malheur: A Tale of the American Fur Trade” a look. With it, Bend author C.J. Adrien takes a break from his series of books about the Vikings (not the Minnesota kind) to take a side mission to historic Oregon and the early fur-trapping trade.

Inspiration for the new book can be traced back to his time in the classroom of retired Bend-La Pine Schools teacher Bob Boyd, both a former instructor at High Desert Middle School — Adrien was in his classroom in 7th and 8th grades — and the former curator of Western history at the High Desert Museum, from which he retired in 2012.

“I grew up half-here, half in France,” Adrien explained. Before seventh grade, he’d attended public school in France and spent summers in Bend. “For seventh and eighth grade, we moved here full-time. And then I went to school here, and then we’d go back to France for the summer — so we just did a swap.”

On alternating years, Boyd’s students would do a fur trade project for the Western exploration portion of their American history studies. Adrien, who now works in marketing and video production in addition to writing, was later a student teacher in Boyd’s classroom and became further familiar with the fur trade project.

As a student, Adrien found Boyd’s project on the fur trade in Oregon country particularly engrossing as someone who was raised dividing his time between Bend and France.

Adrien’s call — Bend author, historian takes on the Vikings

“You can imagine moving to the United States from France to start going to school in English,” Adrien said with a laugh. “That’s a big move, right? And then you’re sitting in social studies class where the teacher is explaining that the first (European) people to come out to Oregon country, or out this way, were people who worked for the Hudson Bay Company and a lot of them were French speaking.

“Hence why we have so many French place names here, Malheur being one of them. Malheur means ‘bad luck’ or ‘misery’ in French.”

“I taught in Burns for a year,” he continued, “and I knew when I saw (Malheur) on a map, ‘There’s a story here, and I want to write it.’”

When he set out to write a novel, the first draft very much resembled something inspired by the classroom in which he first learned some of the fur trade history.

“The first draft that I wrote, I went full historian,” Adrien said. “I put so many historical details in there, my editor came back and said, ‘No, you need to rewrite this thing because you’re going to lose everybody.’”

The finished product, available in paperback and ebook at Amazon.com, tells of the Western adventures of a man named Christian, who, like the author, is half-French and half-American, although the comparisons stop there. Christian is also a very different personality from the Vikings Adrien penned in his Saga of Hasting the Avenger series.

“In the bustling frontier town of St. Louis, New Yorker Christian dreams of wealth in the fur trade, only to find himself perilously ill-equipped for its harsh realities,” the book’s promotional description reads in part. “A rowdy tavern brawl thrusts him against the formidable trapper, Fergus MacBride. To his shock, the very next day, he discovers MacBride is also his new company leader.”

“It’s really the story of the expedition,” Adrien said. “That’s where the fur trade project comes in because the whole idea with the fur trade project was to put together an expedition to send to Oregon country. And that’s essentially what I did.”

“There’s a story here, and I want to write it.”

— C.J. Adrien, of Bend, author of “The Road to Malheur: A Tale of the American Fur Trade”