The Plague Rider

The Frontier Physician Time Forgot—and His Daring Ride to Save a Generation

The Plague Rider plunges you into a forgotten chapter of the American Southwest—when deserts were roadless, smallpox was a death sentence, and one unsung doctor dared to gallop straight into the epidemic’s maw.

In December 1803, Basque-born surgeon Dr. Cristóbal María de Larrañaga receives a fragile vial of cow-pox lymph and an impossible order: carry living vaccine 1,400 miles from Chihuahua to the edge of the Rocky Mountains before it dies in the cold. With a mule train of orphan “courier” children, a scarred Navajo scout, and a midwife who trusts science more than saints, Larrañaga races against deserts, floods, Apache raids—and the ticking clock inside every blister.

His daring ride sparks the continent’s first mass-inoculation campaign, slashes smallpox deaths in half, and quietly rewrites the rules of frontier medicine. Yet history forgot his name—until now.

Packed with true-life suspense, The Plague Rider reveals:

• A frontier thriller: ambushes, blizzards, river crossings, and a last-second amputation under open sky.

• A public-health origin story: lime pits, boiled-water “chants,” and a portable Silent-School that outsmarted epidemics decades before germ theory.

• A timeless hero: a physician who put arithmetic before applause, saving 31,000 lives with nothing but grit, empathy, and a curved Basque needle.

If you loved The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks or The Ghost Map, prepare to meet the frontier doctor who outran death—and discover why his forgotten pulse still echoes in every modern vaccine drive.