Gold Rush Tales
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Firebaugh's
Ferry
Selected as best story of the month by Frontier Tales, the online
magazine of western fiction.
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It wasn't much of a town. The one ramshackle wooden building looked so poorly made that
someone must've piled the barrels of beans, barley and wheat along the sides just to keep the place
from blowing down in a good-sized wind. Next door a large round tent with 'saloon' scrawled in crude
red letters over its open flap beckoned, and the rest of the posse ducked inside, their prisoner in
tow. Read
more . . .
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Bottomless Bartlett's Beautiful
Bride
I stood there idly wiping clean glasses with a dirty bar rag and watching
my only customer shovel food down his maw like a hungry grizzly bear after a long winter nap.
Bottomless Bartlett they called him and the man could pack enough grub away in one day to feed
Kearny's Army of the West for a week.
Read
more . . .
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Payback at Murderer’s Bar
Sunshine suddenly flooded through the open door of the cabin. I picked up the crutch my eldest, Enos, had fashioned from an alder branch and limped outside. Thick, dark clouds still roiled above the river as far as I could see, but off to the west a small gap between heaven and earth had given the setting sun a last brief opportunity to remind us of the glory of it’s existence.
Read
more . . .
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John Putnam
Born in a small Southern town, the only son of an avid outdoorsman, John spent many
weekends exploring the nearby woods and lakes. And on his way home from school was the county
library. He stopped in so regularly that often four books would be waiting for him at the checkout
desk. He didn’t realize until years later how special the librarians had treated him, and all because
they knew how much he loved books.
John went on to get a degree from the University of California and still lives in Berkeley, but he
found the workday world didn’t bring the satisfaction he had hoped. Something was missing,
something deep rooted that went all the way back to that small town, the weekends in the country
and the librarians who took such good care of him. Then he fell in love with the rustic charm of
California’s gold country and decided to write his own books. 'Hangtown Creek', his first novel, is
now in print and more exciting gold rush stories are on the way.
John's articles on the history of the California Gold Rush can be found online in the neighborhood
section of the national edition of
Examiner.com.
Contact John
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Novels
The majestic landscapes of Brett Harte’s California unite with Larry McMurtry’s epic old west
realism in an explosion of love, lust, murder and betrayal that comes to a powerful climax along a
beautiful stream, home to the largest strike in the mines, where a burning barn ignites the passion
of a gold rush boomtown and, in one dark night of revenge, earns that stream the name it bears to
this day—HANGTOWN CREEK.
Hangtown Creek
Chapter 1
Fall 1846
The earth, rutted deep from hundreds of wheels, churned raw by thousands of hooves, bore witness
to the recent passing of a large immigrant party—all save one battered wagon that sat alone and
untended, a loose pot clanking in the cold north wind. Here the trail followed the Truckee River,
strangled by a long, dry summer into a trickle of shallow pools, and looking as pitiable as the forlorn
wagon. Read more . . .
Hangtown Creek in softcover
Hangtown Creek for Kindle
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