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The old adage of “write what you know,” certainly applies to the case of Colonel Russell “Red” Reeder, who lived from 1902 to 1998. He was born in an army fort in Kansas where his father was an officer in the US Army. Reeder was an outstanding athlete at West Point and graduated in 1926. He served in the Army for a total of 21 years, including command of troops at D-Day on Utah Beach, where he lost part of one leg. Reeder served as an athletic director at West Point and became a writer. After 1967, he retired from West Point and became a full-time writer. All of his non-fiction has been about the wars and leaders in the wars of America (all worth reading), and his fiction has been about life in the American armed forces. He also wrote two of the American Landmark series, Medal of Honor Heroes and West Point Story.
Attack at Fort Lookout is a middle to high school level historical novel whose main character is Lieutenant Andrew Raeburn, fresh out of West Point and assigned to Fort Lookout on the far northwestern United States frontier. Somewhere in Oregon or Washington, you think? The time was just before the war of 1812, so the far northwest frontier of the US was 50 miles from Detroit in the Michigan territory. There were French and British influences in that region but the main reason for the fort’s presence was to guard Detroit from the attack of hostile Native American tribes. A secondary reason was to bring law and order into a territory that was not yet a state (Michigan only became a state in 1837).
Reeder knows what life on an army base is like and has done his research into how that life might differ in an 1812 frontier fort. In fact, in an afterword, he says that this story is based on the diary of a Lieutenant Samuel Heintzelman, who graduated from West Point and spent three hard years on the Michigan frontier. In the novel, Lieutenant Raeburn faces trouble with his commanding officer, conflict with the men under his command, some of whom resent an inexperienced officer, and of course trouble with local hostile Indians. He still has time to fall in love with a young half-French, half-Native American young woman. The climax of the novel is an attack on the fort, aided by treachery within the fort. How Andrew Raeburn faces these challenges makes for a most exciting story. Besides a realistic, thrilling tale, there is a lot of early American history that can be learned, in a region not much noticed, by reading this book.