It was just a godforsaken mountainside, but no place on earth was richer in silver. For a bustling, enterprising America, this was the great bonanza. The dreamers, the restless, the builders, the vultures--they were lured by the glittering promise of instant riches and survived the brutal hardships of a mining camp to raise a legendary boom town. But some sought more than wealth. Val Trevallion, a loner haunted by a violent past. Grita Redaway, a radiantly beautiful actress driven by an unfulfilled need. Two fiercely ...
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It was just a godforsaken mountainside, but no place on earth was richer in silver. For a bustling, enterprising America, this was the great bonanza. The dreamers, the restless, the builders, the vultures--they were lured by the glittering promise of instant riches and survived the brutal hardships of a mining camp to raise a legendary boom town. But some sought more than wealth. Val Trevallion, a loner haunted by a violent past. Grita Redaway, a radiantly beautiful actress driven by an unfulfilled need. Two fiercely independent spirits, together they rose above the challenges of the Comstock to stake a bold claim on the future.
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"His Biggest Novel of the West" proclaims the front of the trade paper edition of this book. And indeed for many I suppose it was. At the time Louis L'Amour wanted to write bigger books and get them published in hardback; he wanted to become more than a writer of "westerns". But a writer of westerns is what he was in my opinion, and I mean nothing dispairingly by that, as I do believe he was one of the top half dozen who ever crafted those books. But as with most of his later works he had a tendency to "preach" at the reader and not let the story tell his views or opinions on things. Most creative people are like that, I have discovered. Zane Grey was an exceptionally opinionated man who told you what he thought whether you liked to hear it or not, but never, or perhaps I should say, rarely, ever let it come through in his books in that manner; he let the story tell it. Comstock Lode is a readable book about one of the great silver strikes in the US. Bonanza, the TV western was set near Virginia City, Nevada. Mark Twain worked on the newspaper there during this time learning his craft of story telling. I purchased this book shortly after it came out in the trade paper edition (July 1981) and have had it ever since. It sits on the shelf with all of his other novels.
