Bonanza A Story Of The Gold Trail

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Bonanza (A Story of the Gold Trail)" by William MacLeod Raine. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Excerpt from Bonanza: A Story of the Gold Trail In front of the long one-story adobe station a man waited, eyes turned to the West. His hand rested on the flat straight back of a spirited chestnut horse. Byers was small and wiry, hard as nails. His high heeled boots, buckskin breeches, flannel shirt, and skull cap had all been chosen for utility and not for looks. He wasted no energy in useless protest, but the fat station keeper who leaned against the door jamb and chewed tobacco knew he was seething with impatience. The wrangler holding a second saddled horse knew it, too. For the pony express rider from Carson was late and his delay was keeping Byers from Starting on the next lap of the trans continental journey. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Far as the eye could see lay a rough and broken desert of sage. It stretched to the edge of a flat and arid world. In front of the long one-story adobe station a man waited, eyes turned to the west. His hand rested on the flat straight back of a spirited chestnut horse. Byers was small and wiry, hard as nails. His high-heeled boots, buckskin breeches, flannel shirt, and skull cap had all been chosen for utility and not for looks. He wasted no energy in useless protest, but the fat station keeper who leaned against the door jamb and chewed tobacco knew he was seething with impatience. The wrangler holding a second saddled horse knew it, too. For the pony express rider from Carson was late and his delay was keeping Byers from starting on the next lap of the transcontinental journey.

THIS is the story of the men who sought for gold, from California to the eastern rim of the Rocky Mountains. Mrs. Wolle writes colorfully of the unbelievable privations the men endured in penetrating the fastnesses of the high Sierra and the Rockies and in crossing the desert wastes of Arizona, Utah and Nevada; of the mines first discovered in New Mexico by Coronado and his men four centuries ago; and the first great rush that hit California in 1849. She follows the miners who poured in successive waves into the golden gulches of Oregon, Washington and Idaho, climbed to the deeper mines high in the mountains of Montana, Wyoming and Colorado, and dared at last to penetrate the Indian-infested Black Hills of South Dakota. It is doubtful if the vividness of this phase of history will ever fade for American readers. In personally following the trails of the pioneering prospectors, Mrs. Wolle finds her excitement continually renewed, as she stumbles upon mute evidence of past bloodshed, lust and struggle. It is this excitement which she conveys to her readers both in the text and in the more than one hundred on-the-spot drawings which show the towns and town sites with the eye of the nostalgic lover of this picturesque and courageous part of our national heritage. A guide book for the adventurous, THE BONANZA TRAIL will be attractive alike to travelers, American history enthusiasts and collectors of Americana. Nor will its pages soon be forgotten by the general reader. “THE BONANZA TRAIL is the fascinating and definitive book on the ghost and near-ghost towns of the Old West for which so many students and amateurs of Western Americana have been waiting. Like the once booming camps and diggings which are its subject, it is a repository of the wonderments, glories and pathos of pioneer times and romantic bonanzas....A book that, to the informed intelligence, is almost impossible to put down.”—LUCIUS BEEBE, The Territorial Enterprise

This is a new release of the original 1953 edition.

Loping along the trail, old prospector Dusty Morgan literally falls headlong into a bonanza - a lost Aztec goldmine. Desperate to share the news of his good fortune, despite knowing he should keep quiet, he confides in saloon girl Val Kent. But can she be trusted? And there are other eyes watching and other ears listening: saloon owner Drew Carson and his unscrupulous gunhawk. Meanwhile, a ruthless Aztec woman, Maninza, regards the gold as her rightful ancestral property...

Reprint of the original, first published in 1876.