Fiction · 1912
Riders of the Purple Sage
In 1871, in the border Mormon village of Cottonwoods in southern Utah, Jane Withersteen has inherited her father’s ranch, its cattle and horses, and Amber Spring — the water the whole village depends on — and finds herself pressed by her own church’s elders for the offense of befriending Gentiles. Into this trouble rides Lassiter, a gunman whose reputation runs ahead of him across the territory, and who becomes the one man willing to stand against them for her sake. Zane Grey builds the novel’s twenty-three chapters around the range war that follows, reaching at last into a hidden valley in the high country that gives more than one character somewhere to disappear to.
Grey published the novel in 1912, drawing on his own travels through southern Utah; its landscape and its account of a range at war with itself made it one of the best-selling Westerns ever written, and the book most often credited with fixing the genre’s modern shape.
This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text in twenty-three chapters.
Contents
- Chapter I — Lassiter
- Chapter II — Cottonwoods
- Chapter III — Amber Spring
- Chapter IV — Deception Pass
- Chapter V — The Masked Rider
- Chapter VI — The Mill-Wheel of Steers
- Chapter VII — The Daughter of Withersteen
- Chapter VIII — Surprise Valley
- Chapter IX — Silver Spruce and Aspens
- Chapter X — Love
- Chapter XI — Faith and Unfaith
- Chapter XII — The Invisible Hand
- Chapter XIII — Solitude and Storm
- Chapter XIV — West Wind
- Chapter XV — Shadows on the Sage-Slope
- Chapter XVI — Gold
- Chapter XVII — Wrangle’s Race Run
- Chapter XVIII — Oldring’s Knell
- Chapter XIX — Fay
- Chapter XX — Lassiter’s Way
- Chapter XXI — Black Star and Night
- Chapter XXII — Riders of the Purple Sage
- Chapter XXIII — The Fall of Balancing Rock
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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.
Source mind
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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