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(More customer reviews)I had to let this one rest a little bit before I was willing to take an analytical point of view. It was a good love story and I wanted to enjoy feeling mushy and misty about it. Actually, there are two love stories, one a Romeo & Juliet plot sort of like "All the Pretty Horses" (Impossible not to picture Penelope Cruz!) and the other the classical Odyssey plot except that this Penelope is named Susannah (as in "Oh,Susannah") and her father-in-law throws her out of the young couple's comfortable Midwestern farm. The contrast in the two young men of the stories is that one is a from a large, vigorous, open-your-mouth-so-I-can-put-this-silver-spoon-in prosperous family which he needs to escape and the other is from no real family and barefoot in the world. (He's the one who falls in love with the Californio girl, who believes she is living in an extension of Mexico.)
All four are true to their genders and their times and each must endure much before the ending. The final reunion of Ulysses and his Susanna capitalizes on the light in a canvas tent, if you remember what it's like. "...a magic shadowless place. The golden light burnished Ulysses, turning his deep tan into amber liquid. It caught his face, and she saw a man who had been transformed. As much gold emanated from him as from the filtered sun." The other story ends classically: "Stephen Jarvis lifted her in his arms and carried her up."
The interesting "inside" factor is that when Wheeler was working on the book he had an agent who kept trying to influence him to make bad guys the focus. Wheeler resisted this and perhaps his resistance and the necessity of defending his own particular style and world-vision made this novel even more coherent and dense with detail that it would have been otherwise.
The WORST villain is a man leading a party crossing of the US to California. Not content with traveling so early that much of the trail is still mud, he pushes his livestock to their limits and then shoots them so they can't recover to be used by others coming behind. Carcasses go into water sources to spoil them. Any dissenters are abandoned with no supplies. Also, he burns off all the grass as he goes, to slow down any travelers behind him. One longs for him to end up on some Indian rotisserie, but he gets to California and thrives in the gold fields, wandering off into a continuing brutal life. He doesn't do much digging -- just takes gold from others.
There are two other "bad guys," one female, who are both portrayed as human. Both are gamblers and the male version warns, "Don't gamble with me because I'll clean you out no matter who you are." And he does.
The key to the plot is what happens AFTER the men have either made or not made their gold strike: how they respond to the developing government and rising population. After the boom had ended, those who prospered were the ones who found opportunities in mercantile and agriculture. Sometimes the gold was key and sometimes skills from back East made the day. Many times chance made the difference, just as it did in finding the gold.
As usual there is a lot of interesting historical detail. I hadn't thought about all the ships in California bays, abandoned on the tide flats when the sailors deserted to look for gold. Some became instant floating hotels, stores or even jails. A phenomenon of gold, the heavy metal, is that it settles through the gravel beds of streams and lodges against the bedrock. One can only get at it with heavy equipment or by digging "coyote holds" five or six feet deep, risking death in collapses. Even a simple technology like a rocker box made an enormous difference.
This book won Wheeler a Spur Award and was certainly part of the case for his Owen Wister Award for lifetime achievement.
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