AUTHOR FAVOURITES: MANHUNTER’S MOUNTAIN by WAYNE D. DUNDEE

You can’t pigeon-hole Wayne D. Dundee! He writes westerns (winning a Peacemaker award), mysteries (nominated for numerous awards), crime novels, a novel about vampires, a boxing-meets-the-underworld novel…

Of his westerns he tells me he likes MANHUNTER’S MOUNTAIN, the first novel he did featuring DAVID CRANMER's popular CASH LARAMIE character, a book ‘where I think I came close to capturing almost exactly what I set out to do.’

U.S. Marshal Cash Laramie makes his way down the side of a mountain with a prisoner in tow, and two prostitutes eager to escape a mining town that's gone bust. But potential dangers pile up for Cash: nature providing an early winter storm and a rabid wolf; Mankind a gang of angry townsfolk eager to keep the prostitutes in town at any cost, and a ruthless bounty hunter dogging the lawman’s trail.

Here’s a real mountain mining camp, Leadville, Colorado, in 1885.

 And some real prostitutes of the period.

 Findings of gold, silver and other minerals played an enormous part in speeding the settlement of the American West. Strikes of mineral riches not only encouraged the mass migration of the California Gold Rush but brought settlers to remote and inhospitable areas like Nevada, Colorado, Montana and Arizona that might only have been sparsely populated otherwise. How would the history of the Old West been different without JAMES W. MARSHALL, WILLIAM RUSSELL, SAM BATES, HENRY COMSTOCK, JOHN WHITE or ED SCHIEFFELIN?

These weren’t in all cases the first people to find mineral wealth in the areas they prospected but they were the ones who acted on it, and are most associated with those strikes.

JAMES W. MARSHALL was 37 years old on January 24 1848, a foreman working for California pioneer John Sutter. On that day he found traces of gold in the tailrace of a lumber mill he was building for Sutter on the American River.

In 1848 any gold rush was limited to people in California and the Pacific coast area of the U. S. A. In 1849 the word had spread and ‘the world rushed in.’ An estimated 300,000 people came to California by land and sea, creating a new state of California within a year and blazing trails across the interior of the western United States that were the basic arteries of future settlement. But Marshall himself didn’t profit from his discovery and died penniless.

James Marshall

Some of the prospectors who swarmed over California began to range eastward into what was then almost virgin territory

WILLIAM 'GREEN' RUSSELL had rushed to California but by 1858 was prospecting in what is now Colorado. In the first week of July Russell and SAM BATES found a small placer deposit near the mouth of Little Dry Creek, the first significant gold discovery in the Rocky Mountains. This sparked off the Pike's Peak Gold Rush. The rush brought a significant population to the area for the first time and created mining camps such as Denver and Boulder that would develop into cities.

Canadian HENRY COMSTOCK is only one of several who claim to be the discoverer of ‘The Comstock Lode’ in Nevada, in spring 1859; this was the richest silver mine in American history. Comstock sold out his interest early and did not profit from it. He committed suicide at the age of 50.

Henry Comstock

In July of 1862, a prospector named JOHN WHITE found gold along Grasshopper Creek, a tributary of the Beaverhead River in western Montana. His findings brought its own gold rush to Montana, which then developed as Nevada and Colorado had done.

One of the last major strikes was in southeast Arizona in 1877.

ED SCHIEFFELIN was a classic example of a lone 'sourdough' prospector, to whom the looking was more important than the finding. He'd been prospecting since he was 17. Ed served briefly as a scout for the U. S. army. Hearing he planned to prospect in Chiricahua Apache country, friend and fellow scout AL SIEBER reportedly told Schieffelin: 'The only rock you'll find out there will be your own tombstone.' Or, alternatively, 'Better take your coffin with you, Ed; you will only find your own tombstone there, and nothing else.'

Ed Schieffelin in 1880

Instead Ed found the richest vein of silver ore in Arizona. On September 21, 1877 he filed his first claim, fittingly named 'Tombstone.'

In 1879 a town with the same name followed.

Tombstone in 1880

Ed had accumulated more than $1 million in wealth as a result of the silver boom. But he was incapable of settling down, even when he married. He continued to take off on solitary prospecting trips, ranging as far as Alaska. He wrote: ‘I like the excitement of being right up against the earth, trying to coax her gold away.’

He was found dead alone in his miner’s cabin in Oregon in 1896, aged 49, probably from a heart attack. His last wishes, to be buried in the ‘dress of a prospector, my old pick and canteen with me’ were respected.

Mining camps have featured in many a western, including RIVER OF NO RETURN, THE HANGING TREE and Sam Peckinpah’s superb RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY.

'Ride the High Country'

The snowbound setting also brought to mind westerns like TRACK OF THE CAT

 and DAY OF THE OUTLAW.

Wayne’s westerns have been compared to the work of Gordon D. Shirreffs and Lewis B. Patten.

Reviews for MANHUNTER’S MOUNTAIN:

‘A fast, hardboiled Western that continues the Cash Laramie legend with swagger and good, solid writing. Masterful… Manhunter's Mountain should be on every Western fiction reader's bookshelf.’

‘Hardened Storyline and Characters make this a Great Read for Fans of Crime Novels, Westerns or a Combination Thereof! …A highly entertaining read.’

‘Gritty and Taut…This episode in Laramie's life is one blistering read from start to finish… wonderfully evocative.’

‘Dundee doesn't write for the faint-hearted…This vision of the Old West and the hard men that lived it is as hard-boiled as they come.’

‘The story flows well and there is no lack of excitement. I'll keep reading about Marshal Laramie as long as Mr. Dundee keeps writing about him.’

‘A flawless continuation and provides for some entertaining and tense reading. Excellent!’

‘A tough gritty western.’

https://www.amazon.com/Manhunters-Mountain-Laramie-Gideon-Miles-ebook/dp/B006TMY8TM/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr