A GHOST TOWN ON THE YELLOWSTONE

It's not the matter but the manner of Elliot Paul's books that gives them the wide appeal. The long continued popularity of Linden on the Saugus Branch was unpredable to those who thought that the sale of The Last Time I Saw Paris depended more on trick of title than the substance of text. So once again- here's a gamble. A Ghost To on the Yellowstone is another Elliot Paul- there's your best way to present it. Again a bit of autobiography, dating back to a year's experience in virtually every possible capacity from rodman on, in a surveying party that more or less accidentally became part and parcel of the founding of the short-lived town of Trembles, Montana. The time was 1907- but the mood and tempo, the characters and the incidents that comprise the story, carry over today as ""true Western"", complete with adventures and misadventures, lawlessness, lust, occasional virtue, human bits of story, wild men and wild horses, plague and food that was worse than famine, pleasure sought in primitive guise, love and hate and murder. There are vivid vignettes, longer stories (two of those that stand out most vigorously are the stagecoach journey that precipitated -- literally- the travellers on the site of an unborn village; the Monkey Ward marriage, which ended with an unorthodox triangle; and the tragedy of Cora, the smallpox and the sapphires. Throughout there is the pattern of the making of a mushroom town, in the ""wrong end"" of the Yellowstone valley. Grand reading- tough, bawdy, at times- but entertaining.