Goldfield

Goldfield, Nevada, where there's a bonanza for those who are wily enough to get it.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, incredible gold ore was located in the Nevada desert, and the rush was on. There was Big Sam Jones, a horse trader out to fleece suckers; Maude Arbuckle, a determined prospector, with a shiftless husband to watch out for; Hannibal Dash, a geologist who abandons his academic life and family for adventure; and Delia Favor, another kind of gold digger, who knows how to mine men. The mines yielded an incredible fortune, but not for those who discovered the gold and developed the mines.

This is the second of Mr. Wheeler's celebrated novels about western mining towns and those who flooded in, and drifted out when the mines faded. It was followed by Sierra: A Novel of the California Gold Rush; Second Lives, set in Gilded Age Denver; Sun Mountain, a novel about the fabulous Comstock Lode in Nevada, and The Richest Hill on Earth, about the copper kings of Butte.

Mixing history and melodrama with fast-paced storytelling and frontier detail, Wheeler paints a vivid picture of life in a turn-of-the-century Nevada mining town called Goldfield.... Effortlessly shifting from one set of characters to the next, Wheeler weaves his multiple sagas into an effective narrative that is considerably enlivened by authentic period detail and various actual people... ‒Publishers Weekly

Wheeler’s forte is big, character-rich tales of the last days of the West, and this one-- his 29th novel-- is no exception.... He tells a crisp story that packs an undeniable punch-- as in this well-constructed large-scale American historical. ‒Kirkus Reviews