Where All Your Attempts Cease
“The wagon doesn't care what you were back home. Out here, you become whoever the trail decides to make of you.”
Two thousand miles of river crossings and mountain passes — and encounters with the Cayuse, Shoshone, Umatilla, Pawnee, and Cheyenne — stand between St. Louis and the Willamette Valley. The trail doesn't care who you were back home — it only asks what you're willing to become. Where All Your Attempts Cease follows the wagons west in the spring of 1844, tracing what it costs to shed an old life and build a new one from nothing, what it takes to endure the unendurable, and how love survives when everything else is uncertain.
It's familiar territory for Robert McDiarmid, who writes about the distance between who we are and who we are willing to become — and the people, places, and hardships that close that gap. He is the author of “The House of Wolves,” “Milton and the Morning Monk,” “The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Getting Over Yourself,” and two collections of micro-fiction, “Brief Moments” and “Esoteric Minutiae.” He resides in Palo Alto, CA with his husband David, and their rescue pup Orca.
What readers are saying
“In the spirit of Steinbeck, Robert McDiarmid engulfs us right from the start into the vast unknowns of leaving one life in search of another. The characters spill out in raw poetic truth leaving us with a sense that we are truly at our best when the natural world fights back.” Kevin Adams
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“Unusually ambitious for a trail novel … McDiarmid’s landscape writing is superb. It reads less like a survival adventure than a book about what the frontier hides and eventually forces into the open.”
David Leng Goodreads -
“At once entertaining, interesting and educational … This read is dynamic and multi-dimensional, and is definitely a trip worth taking.”
David Korth Amazon -
“A thoughtful representation of the history of the mass migration of settlers … historical fiction westerns are not my norm!”
George Hobbs Goodreads
Read every review on Goodreads or Amazon — and if you’ve finished the book, please consider leaving one.
Meet the Cast of Where All Your Attempts Cease
Seven lives bound to the same wagon train out of St. Louis in the spring of 1844. This is where each of them begins.
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Miller brought him on to keep the wolves and the desperate away from the livestock. To the families he is a silent monolith who appears when something breaks and vanishes when it is fixed. Born in Montreal, raised hard in Iowa, he has carried a reputation across the plateau country longer than most of the caravan has been alive. West of the mountains they call him Ik-ish-twa-pa-ash — The Always Present Thunder.
Thunder warns people away. Keeps people from discovering troubles beyond their skills.
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He left before dawn with a canvas bundle and his father’s gray mare, carrying an instruction from his grandmother he means to keep: on that wagon he has no kin, no name, no history. Jedidiah Miller has been paid in silver for his passage and asks no questions. The Thornes believe they have taken in an orphan. Martha finds him a puzzle. Silas is less sure.
You are a ghost now, boy. Act like one.
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Fifteen years in Oakhaven, Ohio: a crossroads smithy with a name for true-tempered steel, a house with glass windowpanes, a garden of medicinal herbs and heirloom roses. Then the fever of 1842 took their daughter Clara, the railroad bypassed the town, and eastern factories flooded the market with cheap tools. They sold the forge, the house, and everything in it, and converted a life into gold eagles in a belt.
Maybe it won’t be Eden. But it will be ours.
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Other wagon masters on the St. Louis levee promise picnic weather. Miller promises dead oxen and a grave. He has made the crossing before and remembers exactly where he left people — three of them near the Big Blue in ’39, killed not by the country but by a frightened man with a new rifle. He is hard and he is honest, and the difference matters.
You’ll lose half your oxen. You’ll likely bury someone you love… But if you listen to me, I’ll get your wagon to the valley.
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Hired at the fort for the next five hundred miles, because the alternative is a slow death by geography. Shuhahway has seen enough of the emigrants’ world to know exactly what it is worth; his trade gun has been cleaned every night for a decade. His daughter Iha reads a wagon line for its weaknesses — a loose spoke, a limping ox — and carries the jargon of the trade. When the Pawnee need talking to, she speaks like a woman confirming a contract.
To the Pawnee, you are not ‘pioneers.’ You are travelers using a road through their home.
The Collection
Six books tracing the distance between who we are and who we're becoming — available in paperback, ebook, and audio editions.
Where All Your Attempts Cease
A wagon train leaves St. Louis for the Willamette Valley in the spring of 1844 — two thousand miles of river crossings, mountain passes, and encounters that ask everything of the people who make the journey. A novel about what it costs to shed an old life, what it takes to endure the unendurable, and how love survives when everything else is uncertain.
The House of Wolves
Roy Wallace falls for David Moreau and is drawn into the House of Wolves, an intentional community of gay men bound by honor, spirituality, and brotherhood in the Pacific Northwest. After the loss of the household's founder, the men must rediscover the faith that first brought them together.
The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Getting Over Yourself
Getting dumped stings. Bill is swept off on a reluctant desert getaway by his roommate Barnum, where a poolside conversation with Arthur convinces him he isn't done with love after all. A short, funny novella about heartbreak and second chances.
Robert McDiarmid
Robert McDiarmid writes about the distance between who we are and who we're becoming — and the people, places, and hardships that close that gap. He is the author of “The House of Wolves,” “Milton and the Morning Monk,” and “The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Getting Over Yourself,” novels that chart the romantic queer experience in America, as well as two collections of micro-fiction, “Brief Moments” and “Esoteric Minutiae.”
His new novel, Where All Your Attempts Cease, follows an 1840s wagon train from St. Louis to Portland, trading the safety of city life for open plains. It returns to the questions that have always driven his work — what it costs to transform yourself, what it takes to endure the unendurable, how love survives when everything else is uncertain.
Robert resides in Palo Alto, California, with his husband David and their rescue pup Orca.
Royalties & Proceeds Go to Charity
Royalties and proceeds are donated to charity. The 2026 beneficiary is OpenHouse SF, which creates opportunities with — not just for — LGBTQ+ seniors to build and reconnect with community in an intergenerational, age-affirming space.