The Gold Bonanza

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...

A secret worth killing for... Old prospector Dusty Morgan had never given up hope that one day, he'll find his long-sought after gold bonanza. So far, all the gold he's got is a handful of dust from weeks of sifting rivers. But whilst trekking through Arizona, near to the town of Hell's Acre, his luck finally changes. He quite literally falls into a genuine gold mine. Dusty knows he can't just tell anyone about his find, but he figures that Val Kent is probably the only person he can trust with his secret, Miss Val Kent works her days as a singer at Hell's Acre's only saloon, The Last Frontier. Having grown jaded and looking for a way out of town, when Dusty shows her a chunk of gold, she's eager to know the mine's whereabouts. Drew Carson, owner of The Last Frontier, immediately suspects something's up. Managing to cause the old wanderer to reveal his secret, he kidnaps the old man in a desperate bid to keep him from talking. What's more - someone else saw Dusty and the gold. Maninza, a rancher and Aztec Indian, wants to claim the gold she sees as her rightful ancestral property. If she waits for the right moment, Maninza can swoop in and get Dusty to spill the beans on the gold mine before Carson and his gunhawks can. Like Carson, all she has to do is be patient. Meanwhile, suspecting that Carson has taken her old friend, Val ropes in the help of a homesteader, Rod Gayland and his foreman, the portly Bill Tandrill. Fond of Val, Rod tries to keep her safe but even she can't escape the bloody mess that ensues... Can he and Bill find Dusty before its too late? Full of action and twists and turns, The Gold Bonanza is a thrilling Western about the notions of loyalty, greed and love. John Russell Fearn (1908-1960) is well remembered as almost single-handedly driving the post-World War II boom in British publishing with a flood of science fiction, detective stories, and westerns. His writing appeared under various pseudonyms and has been translated into many languages around the world. His other westerns include Stone of Courage, Rule of the Gun, Town Without Law, The Wreckers and Skeleton Pass.

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.

While the great mining bonanzas of the nineteenth-century West made eastern California and Nevada the subject of legend, much of the wealth from the mines flowed to San Francisco and made possible the growth of the city and some fabulous personal fortunes. Among the wealthiest and most powerful of the Bonanza Kings was William Bowers Bourn I and his son and successor, William Bowers Bourn II. The elder Bourn, descendant of an early New England family, arrived in San Francisco shortly after the discovery of gold in the Sierra foothills. Although he eventually invested heavily in mines in Grass Valley and on the Comstock, his initial success was as a businessman in the booming port city. The younger Bourn built upon his fathers success, expanding the Empire Mine in Grass Valley into one of the largest, most productive, and most technologically advanced hard-rock gold mines in the West, acquiring additional mining properties on the Comstock and on Treasure Hill in eastern Nevada, and developing a range of business ventures, including a vast water system that was to become the basis for San Francisco's present water supply. Like many other wealthy men of his generation, William Bourn II was a generous donor to worthy causes and an enthusiastic patron of the arts, supporting such projects as the San Francisco Symphony, the Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915, the construction of the present quarters of the Pacific Union Club, and the creation of his own final home, Filoli, a vast Italianate estate on the Peninsula south of San Francisco.

“A monumentally researched biography of one of the nineteenth century’s wealthiest self-made Americans…Well-written and worthwhile” (The Wall Street Journal) it’s the rags-to-riches frontier tale of an Irish immigrant who outwits, outworks, and outmaneuvers thousands of rivals to take control of Nevada’s Comstock Lode. Born in 1831, John W. Mackay was a penniless Irish immigrant who came of age in New York City, went to California during the Gold Rush, and mined without much luck for eight years. When he heard of riches found on the other side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in 1859, Mackay abandoned his claim and walked a hundred miles to the Comstock Lode in Nevada. Over the course of the next dozen years, Mackay worked his way up from nothing, thwarting the pernicious “Bank Ring” monopoly to seize control of the most concentrated cache of precious metals ever found on earth, the legendary “Big Bonanza,” a stupendously rich body of gold and silver ore discovered 1,500 feet beneath the streets of Virginia City, the ultimate Old West boomtown. But for the ore to be worth anything it had to be found, claimed, and successfully extracted, each step requiring enormous risk and the creation of an entirely new industry. Now Gregory Crouch tells Mackay’s amazing story—how he extracted the ore from deep underground and used his vast mining fortune to crush the transatlantic telegraph monopoly of the notorious Jay Gould. “No one does a better job than Crouch when he explores the subject of mining, and no one does a better job than he when he describes the hardscrabble lives of miners” (San Francisco Chronicle). Featuring great period photographs and maps, The Bonanza King is a dazzling tour de force, a riveting history of Virginia City, Nevada, the Comstock Lode, and America itself.

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.

Gold! A single handful of shiny nuggets changed Oregon from a quiet settlement in the Willamette Valley to a brawling frontier that stretched from the Rockies to the Pacific Ocean. Thousands of adventuresome souls faced staggering hardships as they streamed across two thousand miles of America's wasteland and then, armed with pick and shovel, headed for the mines.