Reading these comments it amuses me that I found the book much like a romance novel, only with the 'bodice ripping' sexual aspects of romance novels replaced by raptures over western landscapes. As far as sex and romance goes it was incredibly chaste. I thought the characters were rather unrealistically simplistic at times. Take the climatic scene between Venters and that simp Elizabeth Earne. Paraphrasing in Elizabeth Earne's voice over a interval of moments:
“I love you and want to go away an marry you”
She hears Venters has killed the man she thought was her father.
“I can never marry you now, forget me.”
She hears that Oldrig was not her real father, instead that being a man she never knew.
“I love you and want to be with you forever.”
Not to mention the implausible connections revealed between them all. Something worthy of Dickens'
Great Expectations.
The Mormon Church certainly was cast as the bad guy in this book. Then it really was unpopular back then for a lot of reasons. Why even far off in England Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made the Mormon Church the bad guys in his first Sherlock Holmes novel,
A Study in Scarlet. The Mormons were regarded with suspicion, almost as a cult. There was also the polygamy issue that continued for a time even after the church formally renounced it in 1890. Then there was the Mountain Meadows massacre of an emigrant wagon train bound for California by a combination of Native Americans and a Mormon militia in 1857. (I just happen to up on some of the history of the Mormon Church from having just read
The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff.)
I found the chance discovery of the “Garden of Eden” Valley an interesting aspect of the book. This is a quote from a book I have about the Anasazi Culture:
Quote:
“On a bitterly cold December day in 1888, two cowboys chasing strays through the tangled canyons and mesas above the Mancos River in southwestern Colorado broke out along the rimrock to let their horses blow and get their bearings. . . . But even as they rested, a decisive draft draft pushed between the canyon walls, sweeping th falling snow before it, to reveal a stone house—no a whole series of stone houses—tucked back in a huge recess in the cliffs across from them.
. . .
What Richard Wetherill and Charlie Mason found that December day was just one of many prehistoric Indian ruins that dot the Mesa Verde, all long abandoned. Their discovery was not the first sighting of a cliff dwelling in Mesa Verde, for as early as 1874 William H. Jackson, the famed photographer of the Hayden Survey, had photographed a ruin in Mancos Canyon. But Wetherill and Mason had found Cliff Palace, the glittering jewel of Mesa Verde, preserved and protected from the erosion of time by its cave.” from Anasazi – Ancient People of the Rock by David Muench and Donald Pike.
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Zane Grey was almost certainly aware of this true story. I've always wanted to visit the 'Four Corners' are of the US to see these Anasazi ruins.