Slumgullion Gold

Slumgullion Gold is a Western novel by Alex Harold, set in Lake City, Colorado. Our catalogue lists it at 147 pages, and Open Library gives 2000 as the year, which is earlier than the other two Slumgullion novels.

The catalogue describes Harold as following in the tradition of Western novelists who mix the lore of the Old West with the thrills of real adventure. The common thread across his books is the town itself, and this one keeps to that habit. Lake City is a real mountain town in the San Juans, so the setting carries a lot of weight before a single scene begins.

We don't have a plot summary we can stand behind, so we won't invent one. What we can say is that the title points at gold, that the story is fiction, and that it is short enough to read in a weekend. If you want to know whether it suits you, read it next to the other two Slumgullion books, which share the setting.

This one suits readers who like Western fiction with a sense of place and who don't mind a story rooted in a small Colorado mining town. It will also appeal to visitors who have driven to Lake City and want a novel to carry the setting home. At 147 pages it makes a good first Slumgullion book for someone testing the series, and a sensible gift for a Western reader who already owns the classics. It is fiction, so it is not a local history.

Alex Harold is the author of three Slumgullion novels and the three book set in our catalogue. Open Library has an author record for him but lists no birth or death dates, and we haven't found a biography we can verify. So we'll say only what we know through the books: he wrote Westerns, and he wrote them about Lake City. His author page lists all the volumes together.

More about Alex Harold →

Lake City sits in Hinsdale County in the San Juan Mountains. Local history gives the town a clear start. Harry Henson and three others found the Ute-Ulay vein on August 27, 1871, and in August 1874 Enos Hotchkiss filed the Hotchkiss claim near Lake San Cristobal, then built the first documented structure on the site of what became Lake City.

The town grew fast once it had a post office. The U.S. Post Office opened on Gunnison Avenue on June 18, 1875, the Lake City Silver World started printing the next day, and the townsite was incorporated on August 16, 1875. The county seat had moved from San Juan City to Lake City that February. That is the world of claims, newspapers and county business a Western novel about this town can draw on, whether or not Harold uses those particular facts.

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