Trail to Vicksburg

by Lewis B. Patten

Book Overview

Denver City's early days of gold discovery are the setting for The Golden Magnet. Cole Estes is on his way there to work for the mail and stagecoach franchise, but murder and sabotage has left the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0843947004
• ISBN13: 9780843947007
• Release Date: March 2000
• Publisher: Leisure Books
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 4.2" x 6.8"

Customer Reviews

Pulp fiction---pure entertainment.

This book contains two novellas. The first one is a reprint from a 1953 Western pulp magazine. They used to cost a quarter, so for thirty cents you could read a novella and several short stories about the old West and still have enough money left over for a large root beer. It made for a great summer day. The first story, "The Golden Magnet," is wall-to-wall action. The ending is quite rushed, as though Patten had to reach a certain word count and not exceed it. Regardless, it's fun. The second story is much better. It's a Civil War tale that was originally rejected because of the Civil War theme, then found years later among Patten's papers. Today, of course, Westerns are a quiet corner of the market and Civil War fiction is on fire. In the 1950s, though, a drug store book rack was usually about 30% Westerns with flashy cover pictures of trail drives and gun battles in the streets. It was great! Reading Patten is like reading L'Amour. Smooth, with lots of action and entertainment and memories of another era. I read many of his novels in the 1970s and it's great to see him back in print.