The Blue Goose

A Colorado mining camp, a mill, a saloon called the Blue Goose, and a superintendent who cannot decide whether the ore is being stolen by the miners or by the men who own them. Nason was a mining engineer and geologist who wrote the West as a working professional rather than a tourist; the ore assays are correct, which is not something one often says of a novel. Fifty-nine plates of river and plains scenery by painters including George Catlin and Jacob Philipp Hackert carry the western current that runs beneath the mine and its assayer.