In the Heart of the Rockies, G. A. Henty
Coincidentally, one of the easy books up for first-round proofing when
I joined
Distributed
Proofreading was by G. A. Henty, who had also floated to the top of
my library hold list. Henty is on that list because of something
ambivalent
A.S. Byatt wrote about him - my notes suggest that I
expected it to be a guilty pleasure - and so it is. It's very
Boy's
Own literature; in this particular one a plucky young lad leaves
his sisters in [England] to seek his fortune hunting gold with his
uncle in the Rockies. Rough but kindly persons take care of him the
whole way, including a saloon-keeper who congratulates him on the
wisdom of avoiding drink; he learns outdoor skills, goes across
country, meets up with Indian warriors and his uncle, builds a winter
cabin & defensible revetments, fights off bears, finds gold... It's
perfect hammock reading; something keeps happening, but you can put it
down at any moment, he'll be fine when you get back.
Worst parts; the descriptions of the Indians. I think the author meant
us to respect the courage and skill of his (sketched-in) Indian
characters; his European characters certainly do, and also remark that
the most unpleasant Indians have become so after interactions with
sleazy cheating whites. There was contemporaneous fiction a lot more
racist than that. But it's obvious that no amount of non-market virtue
is going to save them; when "the chief" refuses his share of gold, on
the grounds that it could not buy him anything he wants, his reasons
are probably admirable; the Europeans may have been right to admire him
for it; but they should have known enough to invest it in San
Francisco, so his children would have something when the next treaty
was broken. I am *such* a revisionist.
Henty is still enormously in print, with more of his books available on
Amazon than at Project
Gutenberg.
ISBN: 1890623083
So wrote clew in
Fiction (19th c.).