Slumgullion Greed

Slumgullion Greed is the middle book of Alex Harold's three Slumgullion novels, and like the others it takes place in Lake City, Colorado. The catalogue lists it at 167 pages with an ISBN of 1-932738-16-2, and Open Library gives 2005 as the year.

Harold writes in the line of Western novelists who blend the lore of the Old West with real adventure. Greed is the word on the cover, and in a mining town it is not a hard theme to find. Lake City's history is full of claims, fortunes and bad bargains, all of which are fair ground for a Western writer.

Our record carries no plot summary beyond that general description, and we won't make one up. If you have read Slumgullion Gold, this longer volume continues the same setting and the same style of story. If you haven't, it still stands as a separate book that you can read on its own.

Slumgullion Greed is for readers who enjoy Western fiction and want one with a real Colorado town as its stage. It works for someone who has finished the first Slumgullion book and wants more of the same setting, and equally for a newcomer who picks it up cold. Collectors of regional paperbacks and Lake City visitors will see the appeal. It is a novel rather than a history, so expect story over footnotes.

Alex Harold wrote this book in 2005, according to Open Library, alongside Slumgullion Grit in the same year. We have no verified biography to share, and the Open Library author record gives no birth or death dates. What the shelf tells us is that he chose one town and returned to it. His author page gathers the complete set.

More about Alex Harold →

Few Lake City stories are better known than the one about Alferd Packer. In February or March of 1874, a six-man prospecting party that included Packer camped along the Lake Fork of the Gunnison River. Five of the six died. On August 20, 1874, five skeletons were found at the foot of a bluff near the river, a spot now called Dead Man's Gulch.

Two days later, on August 22, 1874, a warrant for Packer's arrest, dead or alive, was issued at San Juan City. Hinsdale County itself was only months old then. It had been formed on February 20, 1874, from parts of Costilla, Conejos and Lake counties, and it originally included what is now Mineral County. A book called Greed, set in this valley, has real history close at hand, though the catalogue does not say Harold draws on this episode.

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