Men to Match My Mountains

Taking as his motif the poet Sam Foss’s words, “Bring me men to match my mountains,” Irving Stone has created an interwoven pageant of stories of the great westward drive which, in a few rousing decades, settled a continent and gave the United States dimensions of which its founders hardly dreamed. Exploration, sudden wealth, unspeakable hardship, the golden chance to build a new life in a new land - all these are present in this saga of human aspiration. This book is a colorful gallery of characters: heroes and rascals, adventurers and plodders, men who invaded and tamed or were tamed by what the geographers call the true Far West — California, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado. In the cast are Spaniards, Russians, Yankees, Southerners; Sutter, whose dream of an idyllic retreat in the foothills of paradise was shattered by the Gold Rush; John C. Fremont, Mark Twain, Brigham Young, Ralston’s Ring and the Big Four; the Silver Kings, H. A.W. Tabor and Baby Doe, the Rose of Sharon and Eilley Orrum, and scores more. There were the Mormons who tamed the desert with Bible texts, polygamy and co-operation; miners who played wild melodramas in Nevada’s Comstock Lode and Colorado’s awesome Rockies; the tragic Donner Party; gun-toting newspapermen and bankers; and some of the world’s most fascinating women. There were men who went West to fight, to make millions (or lose them), to die famous, infamous, or unknown; men who built colonies, railroads, cities, financial empires, or dreamed and struggled and failed. They were men who were larger than life size, who matched the mountains and shaped a pattern of American history.