Slumgullion 3 book set

The Slumgullion 3 book set bundles Alex Harold's three Western novels about Lake City, Colorado into one purchase. Our catalogue lists it at $21.95. The three volumes are Slumgullion Gold, Slumgullion Greed and Slumgullion Grit.

The catalogue places Harold in the tradition of Western novelists who combine the lore of the Old West with real adventure. The thread running through all three is the town itself. Buying them together means you start with the whole run in hand, and you can read in any order you like. Reading them back to back keeps you in one small mountain town for roughly 480 pages. That is a comfortable stretch for a week of evening reading.

The catalogue gives no separate publication year or page count for the set. For the individual books, Open Library lists 2000 for Gold and 2005 for Greed and Grit.

The set is aimed at readers who already know they want all of Alex Harold's Lake City Westerns, and at gift buyers who would rather hand over a complete run than a single book. Together the three volumes come to about 480 pages. It suits a Western fan with a long trip coming up, a Lake City visitor who wants a souvenir that reads well, or a library building a small regional fiction shelf.

Alex Harold is the author behind all three books in this set. Open Library carries an author record for him with no birth or death dates, and we have not found a biography we could verify, so we leave one out. The books are the evidence of his work. His author page lists each volume and the set.

More about Alex Harold →

Lake City's railroad age is a good frame for a set of Western novels. Track for the Denver & Rio Grande's Lake Fork Branch reached the town on July 20, 1889, and the first passenger train arrived from Sapinero on August 15 of that year. The last train left Lake City at 2:20 p.m. on May 25, 1933.

The town's paper has a long history too. The Lake City Silver World began publishing on June 19, 1875, the day after the post office opened. The two sets of dates show how soon a mountain town of this kind had a train and a paper of its own. The Silver World's start came only a few weeks before the townsite was incorporated in August 1875.

Source: Lake City area history and timeline (lakecity.com)