“This is the big book that many of us in the West have been praying for … the volume tips the scales at three pounds, Troy weight, not a grain of which is wasted.”
New York Herald Tribune
“Warmly recommended to all libraries as good popular history and useful reference work.”
Clarence Gorchels, Library Journal
“With its more than 100 drawings, 14 sketch maps, a glossary and good index, this is a book for all those who find, as the author does, an inexhaustible fund of romantic interest in the story of the search for hidden mineral riches—the search that, though it enriched only the few, accomplished the opening up of America’s western frontier.”
Chicago Sunday Tribune
This is the story of the men who sought for gold, from California to the eastern rim of the Rocky Mountains.
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 Indians’ sacred 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, Wolle finders her excitement continually renewed, as she stumbles upon mute evidence of past bloodshed, lust, and struggle. It is this excitement which Wolle 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.
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Paperback
978-0-8040-0685-9
Out-of-print
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