Copper Streak Trail - Western Frontier Library Novel

Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970. Volume 44 Western Frontier Library . Hard Back. Fine/Good. 5" x 7 3/4. 318 Pages. This book is Volume 44 in The Western Frontier Library and is the third Rhodes novel to be reissued by the University of Oklahoma Press. Beautiful brown boards with gold lettering over black background on the spine. Book is brand new condition. Interior text pages are near flawless. The dust jacket has light wear to the front and the flap price is clipped. Eugene Manlove Rhodes was a westerner snowed in for twenty years among God's Frozen People, in Apalachin, a hamlet in New York State. During this period of exile from his beloved Southwest, he produced the best and major portion of his literary work, including Copper Streak Trail. This novel has two settings-Cobre, Arizona, and Vesper, a city in the East. The local color and characters in both places come straight from the author's experience. Pete Johnson, the hero of the story, was in real life a wagon boss for the Bar W Ranch. His unlimited, prankish wit and Sherlock Holmesian mind make the story what a London Times reviewer called Wild West fiction with a difference. The plot nevertheless has all the elements of the classic suspense western-a copper mine whose location the good guys try to keep from the bad guys, a villain who rules the town with money and power unscrupulously acquired, and even a crooked poker game. Rhodes scrutinized life without panic, writes W. H. Hutchinson in the introduction, with guts and a sense of humor and an awareness of Luck; and he learned to accept life's rhythms. His lifeview is reflected clearly in the two strongest characters in Copper Streak Trail-Johnson and Robetteelee Carr, a young boy who, the reader senses, will grow up to be the kind of brilliant, courageous, humorous man Johnson is. If you don't want that horse, said Bobby, don't send me after him.