Bret Harte, the writer who essentially invented the American Western, returns to the Sierra Nevada in this tale of an eastern man's violent awakening. John Hale boards a stagecoach through the dark forests of the Sierras, carrying his assumptions about civility and order into a landscape that operates by different rules. When bandits halt the coach and demand valuables, Hale expects his fellow passengers to resist. Instead, he finds only their desensitized silence, their resigned acceptance of danger. Enraged and shamed into action, Hale makes an impulsive decision that will transform him: he will pursue the thieves alone, into the snow-bound wilderness, armed with nothing but his sense of justice. What follows is both a physical ordeal and a moral reckoning, as Hale discovers what he is made of when the comfortable constraints of society fall away. Harte populates his lawless frontier with vivid characters and renders the mountain landscape as both beautiful and lethal. This is the frontier as romance, as myth, as the testing ground for American character.
