Fiction · 1913
Desert Gold
Desert Gold follows Dick Gale, an aimless young American who arrives in the border town of Casita and falls in with the cowboys Ladd and Lash and his old college friend, the cavalry officer George Thorne. Thorne is in love with Mercedes Castañeda, a Spanish girl whose father was killed by the bandit and revolutionary Rojas, who now hunts her across the border; when Rojas's men corner her, Dick and the cowboys spirit Mercedes into the desert, and the flight across the harsh borderland — with a prospector's forgotten gold strike waiting in a hidden valley — becomes as much a fight against the desert itself as against Rojas's pursuit.
Zane Grey published Desert Gold in 1913, the year after Riders of the Purple Sage made him the best-selling western writer in America. A former dentist from Zanesville, Ohio, he had struggled for years to find a publisher before that success; by his death in 1939 he had written more than eighty books and helped define the western as a genre.
Bibliomancer publishes the 1913 text exactly as Zane Grey wrote it.
Contents
- Prologue
- I — Old Friends
- II — Mercedes Castaneda
- III — A Flight Into the Desert
- IV — Forlorn River
- V — A Desert Rose
- VI — The Yaqui
- VII — White Horses
- VIII — The Running of Blanco Sol
- IX — An Interrupted Siesta
- X — Rojas
- XI — Across Cactus and Lava
- XII — The Crater of Hell
- XIII — Changes at Forlorn River
- XIV — A Lost Son
- XV — Bound in the Desert
- XVI — Mountain Sheep
- XVII — The Whistle of a Horse
- XVIII — Reality Against Dreams
- XIX — The Secret of Forlorn River
- XX — Desert Gold
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
1872–1939 · Modern
Zane Grey (1872–1939) was born in Zanesville, Ohio, and trained as a dentist at the University of Pennsylvania, practicing in New York City until 1904. He self-published his first novel, Betty Zane, that year, and left dentistry for good after The Spirit of the Border (1905) sold well; Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) made him the best-selling western writer in America, and Desert Gold followed the next year. He wrote more than eighty books in all, several published after his death in Altadena, California, and did more than any other writer to define the western as a genre.
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